Skill v1.0.0
currentAutomated scan100/100version: "1.0.0" name: verify-source description: "Checks what a specification, standard, RFC, paper, or datasheet actually requires against the primary source, and states the rule with a verbatim quote and its section number. Use when about to state what such a source requires — including when a project doc, research note, prior session, or another agent already asserts the rule. Triggers on 'the spec says', 'per IUPAC/RFC/ISO', 'the standard requires', citing a section number, or resolving a disagreement between an implementation and a claimed rule. Not for ordinary code reading."
verify-source
The rule
No rule statement without a verbatim quote from the primary source.
A paraphrase in a project doc is not a source. A prior session's summary is not a source. Your memory of the standard is not a source. Another agent's research output is not a source — it is a claim to be checked.
Why this exists
A research document once asserted that IUPAC IR-9.3.5.3 requires "the priming that yields the lowest configuration index". No quotation was attached. Every later document inherited it, and it manufactured a conflict between the standard and the maintainer's own reference values that blocked correctness work for a full session.
The section actually reads: "The priority numbers on one of the ligands are arbitrarily primed." No selection rule at all. The governing rule lived one section away in IR-9.3.3.4 and maximizes. Thirty minutes with the PDF dissolved the blocker.
Procedure
- Name the primary source. The published standard, the paper of record, the
RFC — not a wiki, not a tutorial, not a previous analysis.
- Fetch it.
curlit to the scratchpad and cache it; you will read it more
than once. WebFetch answers a prompt about the page with a small model rather than returning its text, so use it only to find where the text lives. Cannot obtain it (paywalled, offline)? State no rule: call it unverified and name the edition needed.
- Extract text you can grep. For PDFs:
pdftotext -layout file.pdf out.txt(poppler:
apt install poppler-utils or brew install poppler). Quote only from text you extracted yourself. If the cited section number is not in out.txt (empty or garbled text, e.g. a scanned PDF), a grep over it proves nothing: return to Step 2 for a text edition.
- Locate and read around it.
grep -nthe section number and the operative
phrases ("highest", "lowest", "shall", "arbitrarily"), then read the surrounding lines. Governing rules are often one section away from where you expect.
- Quote verbatim, with the section number, in whatever you write.
- If the section is there but the rule is not, say so explicitly — "IR-9.3.5.3
states no selection rule" is a finding, and usually a more valuable one than confirming.
Red flags
| Thought | Reality | |
|---|---|---|
| "The spec obviously says X" | Then quoting it costs one minute. | |
| "The research doc already established this" | Did it quote? If not, it asserted. | |
| "It's a well-known convention" | Well-known conventions are the ones most often misremembered. | |
| "The maintainer and the standard disagree" | Far more often, the paraphrase and the standard disagree. Check before picking a side. | |
| "I'll cite the section number" | A section number without its text is a paraphrase wearing a costume. |
Output
State the rule, the verbatim quote, and the section. If a prior document contradicts the source, correct that document in the same change (or, where you cannot edit it, name the file and line to correct) — an uncorrected paraphrase will be inherited again.