Home / the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc / skills-from-the-artificer · GitHub

trust-but-verify SKILL.md skillA

trust-but-verify from the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.

Install it, pinned

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/trust-but-verify@git:20260530.d36a671

Pins git:20260530.d36a671 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.

Audit grade: A, 17 of 17 checks passed
Kind: SKILL.md skill
Repository: the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer
Path: trust-but-verify/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 1
Latest version: git:20260530.d36a671, committed May 30, 2026
Size: 10,999 bytes
Repository stars: 6
License: MIT

Use when you receive findings, a report, or any factual claims back from a subagent/Task before you act on them — re-validate every claim against a primary source (the code itself, the memory directory, CONTEXT.md, docs/ and docs/adr/, context7 library docs, package/API references, or a language spec) instead of trusting the agent's summary. Trigger automatically after any Task/subagent returns a result you're about to rely on, and whenever the user says "trust but verify…

Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.

What the file says

# Trust but Verify

> A subagent's report is a **lead**, not a fact. You trust it enough to investigate — never enough to act on unread.

When you delegate work to a subagent, what comes back is a *claim about reality*, filtered through a model that summarized, paraphrased, and sometimes hallucinated. The agent may be right. It may be confidently wrong. You cannot tell which from the report alone — the wrong ones look exactly as fluent as the right ones.

This skill is the discipline of closing that gap: before you build on, repeat, or report any claim an agent handed you, you re-open the **primary source** and confirm the claim against it. Every claim. With a citation.

## The one rule everything else serves

**No claim is verified until you have opened a primary source that confirms it and can quote where.**

Two corollaries that do the real work:

- **Inference is not verification.** "That's how this library usually works", "the function name implies it returns null", "that lines up with what I'd expect" — these are guesses wearing a lab coat. They produce an `UNVERIFIED`, never a `VERIFIED`.
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

The exact contents, by fingerprint

mdr add the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/trust-but-verify@sha256:acf8709e1d48bc39

The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260530.d36a671, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.

Badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_hdmdsv2cw22ndmib.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_hdmdsv2cw22ndmib)

4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.

Versions

The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on May 30, 2026.

version	committed	commit	size	audit
git:20260530.d36a671 latest	2026-05-30	d36a671	10,999 B	A	view

Audit of the latest version

A 17 of 17 checks passed. Fixed automatic checks with no AI involved, so the same checks give the same answer every run.

pass: Frontmatter block present
pass: Frontmatter declares a name
pass: Frontmatter declares a description
pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (10999 bytes)
pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
pass: No credential-shaped string
pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
pass: No text hidden with inline styles
pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
pass: No link to a raw IP address
pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer · 6 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-11-08 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_hdmdsv2cw22ndmib
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=the-artificer-of-ciphers-llc/skills-from-the-artificer/trust-but-verify
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/acf8709e1d48bc39c8a69affa4b619420a80f7e2da641c0859fd8d422da2da34

Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.

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