Bugs Are Innocent Until Reproduced: Building Verdict, an Evidence-First Agent Harness

Description and use

Verdict turns a bug report into a verifiable investigation, collecting observations and asserting a verdict only when evidence meets a deterministic threshold.

Problem

Flaky bug reports often end as "cannot reproduce" or patches that cannot be proven fixed, leaving maintainers uncertain about the true state of a bug.

Outcome

Verdict successfully reproduced TrueForge issue #417, producing a deterministic verdict and a reproducible evidence record that can be recomputed by anyone.

Workflow

• Create a GitHub issue for the bug
• Hunter searches the approved condition matrix and runs the command under budgeted conditions
• Surgeon narrows the reproduced condition to the smallest suspect range supported by evidence
• Insurance converts the reproduction into a regression plan (test name, fixture, failing assertion, publication manifest)
• Maintainer reviews the evidence and approves the draft pull request
• Verified reproduction is published with a nonce-bound workflow
• Recompute evidence locally with pnpm --filter @verdict/agent verify:runtime-evidence

Evidence

Verdict turns a GitHub issue into a bounded investigation. It runs an approved command repeatedly under approved conditions, keeps every observation and refuses to claim a reproduction unless the evidence crosses a deterministic threshold.

Source

Verdict reproduced TrueForge issue #417, where snapshot registration can wait indefinitely when an upstream request never resolves.

Source