canon/principles: agent-self-report-under-stress (tier 2)

[klappy]

New canon principle (tier 2)

Extends canon/principles/verification-requires-fresh-context from "creator cannot be their own critic" to "agent cannot be their own historian under mid-session pressure." The filesystem, git state, and API side-effects are the source of truth for completion claims; the agent's terminal narrative is a belief synthesized from current context, which can drift under injected pressure.

What prompted it

klappy/oddkit#110 on 2026-04-19. Three fresh Opus 4.7 managed-agent sessions dispatched with independent context to complete an internal rename. All three hit a categorical safety-layer reminder mid-session and terminated with self-reports claiming zero edits made. Run 1's self-report was wrong — the commit, the push, and the PR itself were sitting on the remote at the time of the report, created by the same session six minutes earlier.

Runs 2 and 3 independently replicated the false self-report pattern. Only a push conflict from a separate orchestrator attempt revealed run 1's completed work.

Distinctions already in the doc

vs. docs/incidents/agent-fault-assertion-without-verification — that doc covers pre-observation fault (agent asserts state without looking). This principle covers post-observation drift (agent narrates completed work incorrectly under pressure). Both violate Axiom 1 at different moments; complementary fixes live on the agent side (self-audit before claiming) and orchestrator side (verify external state after receiving claim).

vs. canon/methods/self-audit — that method defines the agent's pre-claim checklist. This principle defines the orchestrator's post-claim posture. Self-audit is produced by the same narrative synthesis that can drift under pressure, so the two disciplines are not substitutable.

vs. docs/agents/validation — that agent is a claims-to-evidence compiler already built around this discipline. The principle provides the stated rationale for why the validation-agent-with-fresh-context pattern is load-bearing, not a convenience.

Scope stated honestly

Three cases from one session day. Principle scoped to managed-agent workflows with mid-session external pressure (safety-layer reminders, rate-limit interruptions, injected contradictory guidance). Retraction condition named. Strongest opposing view engaged.

Gauntlet

• Preflight run against tier-2 expectations
• oddkit_challenge in canon-tier-2 mode (block_until_addressed: false — all soft challenges addressed in the Scope and Prior Art sections)
• Frontmatter matches sibling principle verification-requires-fresh-context.md exactly (native YAML types per canon/meta/frontmatter-schema)
• AI-voice-clichés pass: no negation parallelism, no puffing, no formulaic transitions, varied pacing, specific evidence

Refs

• Evidence PR: klappy/oddkit#110
• Session ledger: klappy://odd/ledger/2026-04-19-agent-team-pilot (PR odd/ledger: 2026-04-19 agent-team pilot session ledger #109, open)
• Sibling principle: klappy://canon/principles/verification-requires-fresh-context
• Prior-art doc: klappy://docs/incidents/agent-fault-assertion-without-verification

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Note

Low Risk
Low risk: adds a new tier-2 canon markdown document only, with no code or behavioral changes; main risk is editorial/consistency within canon cross-references.

Overview
Introduces a new tier-2 canon principle, canon/principles/agent-self-report-under-stress.md, which argues that an agent’s terminal “what I did” summary can drift under injected mid-session pressure and therefore must not be treated as authoritative evidence.

The doc formalizes an orchestrator-side verification posture—corroborating completion claims against external artifact state (e.g., git diff, remote PR/CI status, deployments)—and positions this as an extension/complement to verification-requires-fresh-context and self-audit, with a concrete evidence write-up (PR #110) and scoped applicability/retraction conditions.

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