Outcome Verification: Check the State, Not the Claim

On a Monday, Desk told a customer, "Your refund of 84 dollars has been issued. It should appear within five business days." Nine days later, the customer wrote back to say that no money had arrived.

The team read the record of the run. At step 5, the refund tool had returned a timeout from the payment system, and nothing had been refunded. At step 6, the model wrote that confident reply and requested no more tools, so the loop ended exactly as designed. Every check had passed, and the harness had marked the case as resolved.

The model's sentence was treated as the fact