Parts an agent won't regenerate

A part is verified when an agent stops arguing with it.

That is the whole game, and it took me a while to say it that simply. For months I described what I'm building in terms of catalogs and registries. The real test is smaller and sharper: does the agent reuse the part, or does it quietly write its own?

Right now they all write their own. Ask for a file uploader and the agent produces one — competent, plausible, untested, and subtly different from the last three it made. Multiply that across a team and you have a codebase that drifts while it grows.

So the mechanic has to make reuse the obvious move. Each part carries a conformance contract — what it promises, what it refuses, the interface it holds. It carries an attestation: who verified it, against what, when. And it carries a badge the reviewer can read at a glance — this region is verified and pinned, that region was generated this morning and trusts nobody yet.

The badge is for the human as much as the machine. When you review an agent's work now, everything looks equally confident. Generated code wears the same face as code that survived a hundred runs in production. The trust signal has to be visible, or the human rubber-stamps the drift.

What I want is unfashionable. I want the agent to encounter a part and feel no urge to improve it. To treat it the way a machinist treats a bolt — a known quantity, threaded to spec, not a thing to re-machine on a hunch.

Conformance, attestation, a badge. Boring words. But trust has to be something you can point at before anyone will build on it.