Verify With Andon

Verify analysis with andon

You have just produced (or edited) an analysis artifact: a report workbook, a summary table, a set of claimed figures. Before presenting it, verify it with andon. The verification is deterministic arithmetic — your own confidence in the numbers is not a substitute for it.

The discipline

1. Write the spec while the derivation is fresh. For every number you put in the

artifact, you know which source rows and filters produced it. Encode exactly that as a check. If you cannot write the check, you do not actually know where the number came from — treat that as a defect in the analysis, not in the spec.

1. Cover four layers, in this order:

• schema.* — the assumptions about the source data (unique keys, allowed values,

date continuity);

• reconcile.* — every headline figure against the source, with the same filters

you used to derive it;

• internal.* — totals vs parts, percentages vs 100, derived columns vs their

formulas;

• excel.integrity — if the artifact is a workbook.

1. Run and read:

`` andon run andon.yaml --json ``

Exit 0 = all pass. Exit 1 = at least one FAIL: the artifact is wrong or the spec is — find out which before touching anything else. Exit 2 = REVIEW flags: report them to the user verbatim; do not resolve them yourself. Exit 3 = nothing was verified (a check could not run, or every check was skipped): fix the spec or say plainly that the claim is unverified. Exit 4 = broken spec.

1. Report the verdict with the artifact. Include the counts (passed/failed/review)

and the honesty block's "Never read" list. A clean verdict is part of the deliverable; a dirty one is the deliverable.

Hard rules

• Never loosen a tolerance, add a skip:, or narrow a where: to make a check pass

without stating in your response exactly what you changed and why. A silently weakened spec is worse than no spec.

• Never present a number the spec does not cover as if it were verified. Say which

figures are covered and which are not.

• If a cell read fails with "no cached value" (library-written workbook), point the

check at the underlying data range instead of the formula cell.

• Prefer failing loudly over passing quietly: when unsure between two ways to write a

check, write the stricter one and let the human relax it.

Spec syntax

Run andon init for a commented starter, or see the full reference: https://github.com/gulmezeren2-byte/andon/blob/main/docs/checks.md

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: gulmezeren2-byte
• Source: gulmezeren2-byte/andon
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.