AI coding agents lie about their work. Outcome-based verification catches it.

AI coding agents have a consistency problem. Ask one to add authentication to your project and it'll tell you it's done. Commits made, tests passing, middleware wired up. Check the branch and you'll find a half-written JWT helper, no tests, and a build that doesn't compile. This isn't a hallucination problem. The agent did produce code. It just didn't verify that any of it worked before declaring victory. And neither did the tools sitting between the agent and your main branch. The transcript trust problem Most orchestration tools that coordinate AI agents verify work by reading transcripts. The agent says "committed 3 files" or "all tests passing" and the verifier pattern-matches those strings as evidence of completion. That's trusting the agent's self-report. The issue isn't that agents are deliberately deceptive. It's that they generate completion language as part of their output pattern regardless of the actual state of the codebase. An agent will write "tests passing" into its res