Your Coding Agent Says It's Done. Who Verified It?

A developer building VichuFlow, an open-source Go runtime, argues that coding agents should not verify their own work. The project implements a state-machine architecture where a separate runtime executes verification gates and controls workflow transitions, preventing agents from declaring tasks complete without independent evidence.

A familiar interaction with a coding agent looks like this: "I implemented the feature, updated the tests, and everything passes." That sounds reassuring. But what exactly does everything passes mean? The agent that wrote the code is often also the agent reporting whether the code is correct. In other words, the worker is grading its own work. That is the architectural problem I have been thinking about while building VichuFlow https://github.com/corteshvictor/vichu-flow . Modern coding agents can explore repositories, implement features, refactor code, write tests, and review changes. They are becoming surprisingly capable workers. However, their natural-language response is not reliable evidence that a task is complete. This does not necessarily mean that the agent is deliberately lying. It may have: Prompting can reduce these failures, but prompting alone cannot create a reliable trust boundary. A prompt saying "always run the tests" is still an instruction interpreted by the same system whose work we are trying to verify. The verifier should be a separate authority. For a software task, completion should be based on observable evidence. Here's the flow: If a required gate fails, the workflow should not advance—regardless of what the agent says in its final message. This is similar to CI. A pull request author does not get to declare that CI passed. The CI system runs the checks and records the result independently. I believe coding-agent workflows need the same separation of responsibilities. This led me to a few design principles. Agent conversations are useful interfaces, but they are poor workflow databases. A long-running task should have durable state that survives: The current stage, previous attempts, verification results, and mutation records should exist independently from the conversation. An agent saying "implementation complete" should not automatically move a workflow to verification. The transition should require evidence defined by the workflow: The state machine—not the agent—decides whether that evidence is sufficient. If the workflow requires: go test ./... the runtime should execute that command itself and capture its exit code and output. The agent can recommend a command, but it should not be the final authority on whether the command passed. Autonomous loops can consume far more time or tokens than expected. Invocation limits, wall-clock limits, and available token or cost limits should be tracked by the runtime rather than relying on the agent to stop itself. The verification model should remain the same whether the implementation was written by Claude Code, Codex, another coding agent, or even a shell script. Agents are workers. The workflow contract should be independent from the worker. VichuFlow is my attempt to explore this architecture. It is still an early project. The current release is the first complete slice of a larger runtime architecture, not an attempt to ship every part of that vision at once. It is an open-source Go runtime that executes coding workflows as persistent state machines over a repository. The runtime does not write code itself. It coordinates coding agents and decides whether a stage can advance. A simplified workflow might look like this: explore ↓ propose ↓ plan ↓ implement ↓ review ─── needs fixes ──→ fix ↓ │ approved ←───────────────────┘ ↓ verify Every run is persisted under .vichu/ as ordinary files. The repository owner can inspect the state and event history without needing a separate server or database. Verification gates use the project's existing toolchain: commands: test: go test ./... lint: go vet ./... typecheck: go build ./... For a Node project those commands might use node --test ; for Python, unittest ; for Rust, cargo test . VichuFlow itself is a single binary. It is not tied to Go projects. The current release ships a native Claude Code host pack, headless adapters for Claude Code and Codex, and shell and deterministic test adapters. After installing VichuFlow, a project can initialize the Claude Code host integration: vichu init --host claude-code Then, from Claude Code: /vichu implement password reset using sdd The host delegates the coding work, while the VichuFlow runtime owns the persistent state and verification gates. A headless workflow can also be started from a terminal: vichu exec "fix the failing login test" If a required verification gate fails, the run does not become completed . The agent gets another opportunity to fix the problem, depending on the workflow and its configured limits. VichuFlow is pre-1.0, and separating verification from execution does not automatically create a perfect security boundary. Today, the runtime and coding agent still operate in the same working environment. An agent with direct filesystem access could attempt to modify VichuFlow's local state files. There are also current limitations around concurrent runs, crash recovery during certain verification operations, and filesystem auditing of ignored directories. These limitations are documented publicly because "trust the runtime" should not become another unsupported claim. The current guarantee is narrower: VichuFlow does not accept agent-reported test results as proof. It runs the configured verification gates itself before completing a normal workflow. Making the persisted verdict tamper-evident is one of the next important steps. The current version focuses on establishing the smallest useful trust boundary: That foundation is more important to me than adding a large number of integrations quickly. Once the workflow contract is trustworthy, the same runtime can grow in a few useful directions: These are roadmap directions, not capabilities I am claiming are available today. The central idea should remain the same as the project grows: agents may change, but the evidence required to advance the workflow should not. Coding models will continue to improve. They will write better code, use tools more accurately, and complete increasingly complex tasks. But improved intelligence does not remove the need for independent verification. We do not eliminate CI when developers become more experienced. We do not let a database client decide whether a transaction was committed. We do not ask a background job to be the only record of its own completion. The more autonomy we give coding agents, the more important external state, observable evidence, and deterministic gates become. The interesting question is not only: How capable is the agent? It is also: What evidence does the surrounding system require before trusting it? I am still exploring that question through VichuFlow, and I would especially like feedback from developers already using coding agents on real repositories. How are you currently deciding that an autonomous coding task is actually done? VichuFlow is MIT licensed and available on GitHub https://github.com/corteshvictor/vichu-flow . Disclosure: I used an AI assistant to help structure and edit this article. I reviewed the technical claims against VichuFlow's current implementation and documentation, and the opinions expressed here are my own.