Rule
Verification has a price. Measure what verified-done costs — tokens, minutes, review effort — and drive it toward the cost of unverified-done, without giving up the verdict.
Rigor is tiered by risk, because proof you can't afford is proof you'll stop running. A deterministic check is nearly free; a fresh-context review costs more; an adversarial cross-model review costs most. Spend the expensive tiers where mistakes are expensive, and let the cheap tiers carry the routine. Metered cycles answer the question every unattended run must face: was the outcome worth the tokens?
What AgentOps Enforces
- Track the cost of each verification tier alongside the outcomes it caught.
- Match rigor to risk: deterministic checks for routine work, escalating review for irreversible or high-blast-radius changes.
- Tie metrics to goal movement — proof quality, recurrence, lead time — not agent activity.
- Reject metrics that reward token burn, session count, or code volume by themselves.
Failure Signal
- Every change gets the most expensive review, so verification quietly gets skipped under deadline.
- The dashboard improves while the product does not.
- Nobody can say what a verified change costs versus an unverified one.
- A metric cannot tell you whether to continue, stop, or roll back.
Done Looks Like
Each verified change carries a known cost, that cost trends toward the unverified baseline, and every measured number helps decide whether the loop is making delivery better.