Verified means one thing in Fusion: the frozen Definition of Good was met, and the evidence that proves it exists. Nothing else earns the word. Not a positive read from the judges, not a clean-looking diff, not a run that almost certainly worked. Met criteria plus existing evidence, or the word does not appear.
The rule has a sharp edge, and the edge points at us. If a hard criterion is missing, if a required gate did not produce a readable result, if a piece of required evidence is absent or unparseable, the run is not Verified. We do not guess in our own favor. Ambiguity resolves against us, every time.
Why fail closed, not fail open
Most software treats missing data as a soft failure to route around. A verification harness cannot. Our product is the claim itself: a Receipt is an evidence object, and the value of the word Verified is exactly the set of things it refuses to mean. If we ever marked a run Verified because a gate log was garbled but probably fine, the word would be worth less on every Receipt we issue, including the honest ones.
So the harness reads its own output the way a skeptic would. A gate that returns nothing is a failed gate. An evidence file the parser cannot read is missing evidence. A criterion nobody checked is an unmet criterion. Each of these produces the same verdict: not Verified.
Waivers stay visible, never absorbed
Fail-closed does not mean inflexible. A customer can approve a waiver, and the run can still move forward. But the waiver is recorded on the Receipt and stays visible everywhere the Receipt appears. It is never silently absorbed into a clean-looking verdict. Anyone reading the record sees what was waived and that it was approved.
Three states, one claim of proof
Every run ends in one of three customer-facing states, and only one of them claims proof.
| State | What it says |
|---|---|
| The Receipt | Here is the record of what happened |
| Verified Receipt | The frozen Definition of Good was met, and the evidence exists |
| Accepted Receipt | The customer accepted the result |
The separation is deliberate. Acceptance is the customer's call; proof is ours to earn or fail to earn. One contract can carry both kinds of claim, but they never blur into each other. A run accepted with a waiver is not a run we proved.
Even our green is earned
The same rule shapes the design system. In our product and on our site, the color green appears only where the product earned it, never as decoration. A green mark means a criterion passed with evidence behind it. There is no green for buttons, headers, or mood. When you see green in Fusion, something specific happened, and you can open the Receipt to see what.
If we cannot prove it, we do not say it. If we cannot say it, we do not color it.
Keeping the word narrow
The pressure on a word like Verified only grows. Every new mode, engine, and integration will arrive with a temptation to stretch the definition, to let a near-miss round up. The rule exists so we never make that call in the moment: new surfaces inherit fail-closed by default, waivers stay on the Receipt, and the word keeps meaning what it meant on day one. That is the whole bet. A narrow word, kept narrow, is worth more every year it survives.