Verification Gates for Coding Agents

A verification gate is the check that decides whether an agent loop can stop. Without a gate, the agent may finish with a plausible explanation but no evidence.

Good gates are observable:

• pnpm build
• pnpm test
• pnpm lint
• gh pr checks
• A documented manual review checklist

A gate should be paired with an exit condition. For example, pnpm test is the gate, and “all tests pass without ignored failures” is the exit condition.

The guardrails matter just as much. The loop should tell the agent not to disable tests, weaken checks, delete coverage, or change the gate command just to force success.