An AI agent telling you "done" is not evidence. When I started delegating work to Codex, I took those reports at face value — until I checked the code and found the change missing, the wrong file edited, or no commit at all. So I stopped trusting language and started making the shell write the facts to disk.
Why this design works
When you hand a task to Codex, it comes back with "Completed." At first that satisfied me. But when I actually checked the code, the critical change wasn't there, or a different file had been touched, or git commit had never run. The output "I did it" and the fact "it was actually done" are two different things.
This is true of Claude Code too. Whether tool results were read correctly, whether errors were swallowed — even with code I wrote myself, running a self-audit right after declaring completion turns up something every single time. Delegating implementation to an AI amplifies that problem by one more notch.
The fix is simple: make it write state to a file, not to language.
