After Claude produces anything — a report, a CSV, a summary, a SQL query — your instinct is to check it by eye. Better instinct: make Claude check it with commands, and show you the output.
Verify your own report: every quote must appear as an exact substring of the source file — check each one with
grepand show me the result. The counts must sum to the row count. Recompute the percentages. Fix anything that fails and re-run.
Why this works when “are you sure?” doesn’t: a command either passes or fails. grep finds the exact quote or it doesn’t. Arithmetic sums or it doesn’t. There’s no “looks fine to me” in the loop — which is exactly the failure mode of asking a to reassure you instead of prove it.
The shapes to reuse:
- Quotes →
grep -Feach one against the source file. - Numbers → recompute independently from the raw data, compare.
- Logic (SQL, formulas) → build a tiny test dataset with known edge cases and run it. Don’t review logic; execute it.
- Claims → for each one, quote the exact source sentence that supports it. No quote, no claim.
One more step and it’s permanent: put the verification step in the folder’s CLAUDE.md, so Claude runs it before declaring any output done — you can’t forget what you’ve automated.
This is the habit that turns “I think the AI got it right” into “here’s the command output that shows it did” — which is the sentence your boss actually wants to hear.