Credible claims: the brief before, the record after

Cheaper generation increases demand for scarce validation. The fix is two lightweight artifacts: a research brief that constrains what the system may do, and a claim record that constrains what may be reported. Applies to agents, workflows, sims, proof patches, data construction, anything delegated.

Three standing rules

1. Delegate only after inputs, boundaries, and completion criteria are clear. No open-ended "make it better" runs.
2. Require evidence, not confident conclusions. Every delegated task returns inspectable evidence: locations, diffs, diagnostics, counts, failing cases, logs, never just "done/looks fine."
3. Escalate anything that changes the economic object, the identifying assumptions, the inferential procedure, or the reporting language. Those decisions return to the researcher (the user), always. A standing user ruling counts as a returned decision; record it.

The research brief (before execution)

One short block, written before launching the work:

• Question / target: what exactly is being estimated, proved, built.
• Completion: what counts as done; what results would not answer the question.
• Prohibited substitutions: what the system may not silently change (estimand, sample, assumptions, statement of a theorem, benchmark spec).
• Known failure modes: what tends to go wrong here; the checks matched to each.
• Required evidence: what must come back (numbers, locations, diffs, diagnostics).
• Escalation triggers: which findings/decisions must return to the user before proceeding.
• Blocked-route rule: a route that depends on unavailable data, an unsupported assumption, or an unproved result is marked blocked, a scientific outcome, not an instruction to search until a favorable answer appears.