G-13The Verifier Ladder

Format, lint, typecheck, unit, integration, CI — ordered by seconds to signal, cheapest first.

Key insight

The test loop draws one verifier; in practice it is a ladder, and the ordering is the design. Most iterations never leave the bottom three rungs, which is what makes an agent that edits fifty times an hour affordable.

Failure mode

One monolithic “run the tests” step. The agent waits four minutes to be told about a syntax error, and every retry costs the full suite again.

G-13The Verifier Ladder

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