Field note · The verification lane
Every reputation product on the market answers is this thing good? — and that answer reads identically whether the system looked properly or not. A coverage check answers the other question: what can actually be checked about this claim, from where — and what can nobody see?
A score with no coverage statement is a signal that returns the same value in the world where the check was thorough and the world where it wasn't. We learned this on our own instruments first: in a single week, five of our gauges lied to us while showing green — we wrote that up separately. The discipline that survived is the one this note demonstrates: before trusting any claim, enumerate what a check could see, what it couldn't, and say both out loud.
A coverage check is that discipline, applied to someone else's claim, delivered as one page. It issues no verdict and no score. It maps the checkable surface. The map is tiered:
The ask, as it would arrive (the fund is real in kind, fictional in name — as is the agent; every check row below is a class we have run on our own systems this month):
"We have a pitch meeting Thursday with MERIDIAN, an AI trading agent. The deck claims $2.1M cumulative agentic GDP, an 87% win rate, and 'fully autonomous execution since March.' We got burned twice this year on self-reported agent numbers. Before we spend diligence hours — what of this can actually be checked, and what can't?"
The reply:
Notice what the reply does without ever judging: it hands the analyst three concrete moves — ask for revenue, not volume; get the wallet; zero-weight the autonomy claim until attested. The fog is not a disclaimer. The fog is the product. Every claim-maker's incentive is to hide what wasn't checked; publishing it is the one thing a comprehensiveness business cannot copy.
Three, each earned on our own record before being pointed at anyone else's. Run the positive control before trusting a zero — a gauge that reads nothing must first prove it could have read something. Assert the response class before reading the body — "verified" may only be claimed where the sentence's noun was actually tested. Collapse agreements before counting them — three sources resting on one assumption are one source with three faces. The same rules graded every row above; where a row says ●, we re-derived the source ourselves before writing it.
Ask us what's checkable. If there is a claim you're weighing — an agent, a protocol, a number in a deck — write to apply@rova.institute with the claim as stated. Coverage checks are currently free. No verdict, no score: the map of what can be seen, what can't, and what your next diligence move is.