Verify Claims

What it does

When your agent uses it

• User says verify these citations
• Check the claims in X
• Did I hallucinate anything
• Fact-check this draft

Example prompts

• “verify these citations”
• “check the claims in X”
• “did I hallucinate anything”
• “/verify-claims”

Requirements

• Pre-approved tools (allowed-tools): Read, Grep, Glob, Agent, Task, Write

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

1. 1Pre-Flight
2. 2Extract claims
3. 3Generate verification questions
4. 4Spawn claim-verifier (fresh context — never a conversation fork)
5. 5Reconcile

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit ae72617. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves these tools, so the agent can use them without asking each time:

  • Read
  • Grep
  • Glob
  • Agent
  • Task
  • Write

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are markdown).

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  Links to these hosts (documentation or services it may open):

  • arxiv.org

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Verify Claims loads about 2.2k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 152 tokens; SKILL.md has 832 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~152

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~2.2k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow at commit ae72617, republished under its MIT licence (© pedrohcgs). 832 words, ~2,232 tokens.

name

verify-claims

description

Run Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) on a draft or a block of text with factual claims. Spawns the `claim-verifier` agent in a fresh context (never a conversation fork) so it never sees the draft — then reports which claims are supported, contradicted, or unverifiable. Use when user says "verify these citations", "check the claims in X", "did I hallucinate anything", "fact-check this draft", "run CoVe on this", or after any text generation that asserts facts about papers, datasets, or numerical results. NOT for style/grammar review (use `/proofread`) or substance review (use `/review-paper`).

allowed-tools

Read, Grep, Glob, Agent, Task, Write

argument-hint

[file-or-text-path] [--source <path-or-url>] [--no-fail-closed]

disallowed-tools

Edit, MultiEdit

| ID | Claim | Source hint |
|----|-------|-------------|
| C1 | ... | ... |

Agent: subagent_type=claim-verifier   # a named subagent starts fresh; a /fork copy would inherit the draft
Prompt: hand over claims table + verification questions + source material pointers.
        Do NOT include the draft text.

/verify-claims quality_reports/lit-review_measurement-error.md --source master_supporting_docs/author_2021_method.pdf --source master_supporting_docs/coauthor_2020_survey.pdf

## Post-Flight Verification — lit-review_measurement-error.md

**Claims extracted:** 14
**Verified independently:** 14 (fresh-context claim-verifier)
**Outcome:** FAIL — 12 verified, 1 contradicted by its source (HIGH-WARN), 1 unverifiable (LOW-WARN); the draft is not reported as verified until C7 is corrected

### Discrepancies

- **C7** — draft claims "Coauthor (2020) *proposes* a bias-corrected estimator." Source Section 4 shows they propose a weighting estimator, not a bias-corrected one. Recommend correction.

### Unverifiable

- **C12** — draft cites "Third Author et al. 2024 (working paper)". No canonical URL in provided sources. Recommend user supply DOI or arXiv link.

### Verified

| ID | Claim | Evidence |
|----|-------|----------|
| C1 | "Author 2021 defines the calibration constant as a ratio of moments" | p. 5, eq. (3) |
| ... | ... | ... |

© pedrohcgs, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files in .claude/skills/verify-claims of pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow.

• SKILL.md
• evals/cases/fresh-context-independence.md
• evals/marker.txt

Open the folder on GitHubat commit ae72617