After the incident

The 90-day reset.

For the engineering leader in the week after an AI-attributed incident, when “every agent change needs human sign-off and proof” becomes policy, and the proof is suddenly manual.

The pattern

An incident lands, and the retro attributes it to an agent-authored change that nobody fully read. What follows has the same shape everywhere: a freeze, then a mandate: for the next quarter, every agent change needs a human sign-off and evidence that it was actually checked.

The mandate is right. The way it usually gets implemented is not: screenshots pasted into tickets, review-by-spreadsheet, a senior engineer re-running test suites by hand to prove what CI already claimed. The policy is sound; the tooling is a person. Ninety days of that burns exactly the people the mandate was written to protect, and when it lapses, nothing structural remains.

The policy, productized

Treft is that mandate as a product. Each clause of the reset maps to a mechanism that already runs:

“Independently checked” every change is re-verified from a fresh checkout on a separate machine: exact patch, network cut, your own test suite, an environment the agent never touched.
“With evidence” each verification carries a grade naming exactly what was established, in plain words. Unverified is explicit, never a fake green.
“Enforced, not requested” enable Treft’s clearance check and require Treft Clearance in GitHub branch protection for the branches you want covered. The informational Treft Verification check can conclude neutral; it is not the enforcement gate. Repository rules and bypass permissions still matter.
“Signed off by a human” every approval is a named human decision carrying the grade and its evidence. Shipping below the evidence bar takes explicit consent, and the consent is recorded too.
“Auditable later” the record is append-only and tamper-evident: who approved what, on what evidence, in an audit trail built to survive the retro after the retro.
“Stricter where it hurts” per-project policy can require deeper evidence on sensitive paths and ban unverified ships outright.

What you can require this week

Connect the repositories under the mandate. Open pull requests are picked up and graded the moment you connect. Where the policy demands enforcement, enable Treft’s clearance check and configure branch protection to require Treft Clearance. The separate Treft Verification check reports evidence; it is not the enforcement gate. Reviewers still make named, recorded decisions from a desk or a phone.

One honest boundary, stated plainly: until the check is required, a merge clicked directly on GitHub does not pass through Treft. The verification page says exactly where that line sits.

Honest by construction

A control you adopt in a hard week has to be straight with you. Treft publishes the false-pass rate of its own verifier, measured against gold, with confidence intervals. When it cannot verify, the card says unverified instead of pretending. A grade is evidence, not absolution; the mandate’s judgment stays where it belongs, with your people.

The reset’s one-line spec: the author never grades its own work, and every approval has a name on it.

Verify your first PR — free How verification works

No card · choose one repo · disconnect anytime