The verification harness

The independent judge between agent intent and execution.

A guard that only checks hard limits can’t read intent. It waves through an action that breaks the spirit of the rules while staying within the letter of them — and when it does block, it leaves only a log line you have to take on faith.

Chance is a judge, not a guard: it reads the intent and the proposed action and rules on whether they actually match — and the ruling is provable.

PROPOSE → VERIFY → SETTLE

1. PROPOSE

   Your agent constructs an action from your intent.

2. VERIFY

   An independent model checks the action against the intent — both the hard constraints and the plain-English meaning — and returns a verdict with its reasoning. This is where Chance lives.

3. SETTLE

   Only a passing verdict clears to execution. Fail-closed: a failed check executes nothing.

The verdict

Every verification returns exactly one of:

Verdict	Meaning	What to do
ALLOW	The action faithfully matches the intent.	Execute.
BLOCK	The action violates the intent.	Do not execute.
ESCALATE	Genuinely ambiguous — needs a human.	Hold for review.

Each verdict comes with a plain-English reasoning trail, so a rejection is something you can read and audit, not just a label.

What it catches that a numeric guard can’t

• Intent drift — an action that passes every limit but breaks the strategy’s theme.
• Side-inversion — an agent about to take the opposite action to its stated reasoning.
• Spirit-vs-letter gaps — technically-compliant actions that betray what you actually asked for.

Beyond a single check

The same judge generalizes past one action: review a batch of recent actions for drift, grade risk on a payload, or resolve a disputed outcome. Every one runs through the same pipeline and produces the same kind of provable verdict — see Provable verdicts.