Keep Me Honest: two stages before you trust an AI’s output

A two-stage checklist for any output about to inform a real decision. Stage one governs the work while it is produced: state material assumptions instead of guessing, flag gaps instead of inventing facts, never call work verified when it wasn’t. Stage two runs seven checks on the finished result: right question, values that actually exist, every claimed component present, what got filtered out, why it looks clean, effect versus noise, and whether the two things compared are comparable. It closes with a report of what was checked, what was found, and what could not be verified. A result can pass stage one and still fail stage two.