Trust Decay

The two-phase ledger that tracks confident agent claims and their eventual outcomes. See [[Cost of Confidence]] for the doctrine.

When to use

Phase 1 — Capture a confident claim

• An agent declared something "fixed", "tested", "verified", "complete", "deployed"
• The claim is unhedged or treated as ground truth
• The claim is consequential enough that being wrong about it would matter
• Triggered by Caddy on prompts like: "/trust-decay capture", "log this claim", "capture confidence", "agent claimed", "I claimed", "the agent said it was fixed", "another agent verified"

Phase 2 — Resolve a claim

• A previously-captured claim has been confirmed (right) or revealed wrong
• The principal noticed a discrepancy between an earlier claim and reality
• Triggered by Caddy on prompts like: "/trust-decay resolve", "the bug came back", "that wasn't actually fixed", "trust event", "wrong claim", "confidence was wrong"

How to execute

Phase 1 — Capture

## YYYY-MM-DD — {short claim summary}
**Claim:** "{the actual confident statement, verbatim}"
**Source:** {agent name or self}
**Context:** {what task, what session, what was being worked on}
**Verification stated:** {what the claimant said they verified, if anything}
**Status:** OPEN — awaiting outcome

Append to vault/memory/TRUST_DECAY.md under the "Open" section.

The principal can capture manually, OR /honesty-check (when wired) can auto-capture any unhedged confident claim it produces.

Phase 2 — Resolve

When a previously-captured claim is proved or disproved:

1. Find the open entry in vault/memory/TRUST_DECAY.md matching the claim
2. Append resolution data:

**Resolution (YYYY-MM-DD):** WRONG | PARTIALLY WRONG | CONFIRMED CORRECT
**Evidence:** {what surfaced the discrepancy — file/line/log/observation}
**Time-to-discovery:** {duration from claim to discovery}
**Trust-decay event:** YES | NO
**Pattern:** {one line — what category of mistake/correctness was this?}

3. Move the entry from the "Open" section to the "Resolved" section.

Step 3 — Optional aggregate

If the principal asks for the trust trajectory, walk the ledger and compute:

Trust trajectory ({start date} → {end date}):
- Total claims captured: N
- Confirmed correct: M (X%)
- Wrong: P (Y%)
- Partially wrong: Q (Z%)

By category:
- Doc work: X/Y correct
- Infrastructure: ...
- Production fixes: ...

Recurring patterns:
- {pattern name}: occurred N times — promote to /diagnose checks?

This output becomes the basis for /retro analysis and feeds into the [[Common Failure Modes]] corpus.

Why two phases

The pairing is the whole point. A confident claim with no resolution is just rhetoric. A wrong outcome with no original claim is just a bug. The pair — confident claim, then disconfirmation — is what measures calibration.

Anti-patterns this prevents

• Forgetting that the agent claimed something was fixed three weeks ago when the same bug recurs (no audit trail)
• Treating every fresh occurrence of an old bug as new (no pattern detection)
• Letting agent confidence levels drift without a corrective signal (no calibration data)
• Blaming the agent in the moment without realizing it's the Nth time the same pattern has played out (no longitudinal context)

What this skill is NOT

• Not a punishment system. The ledger calibrates the agent's claims against outcomes. It's measurement, not judgment.
• Not adversarial. Capturing a confident claim isn't accusing the agent of being wrong; it's noting what the agent said so the eventual outcome can pair with it.
• Not the only place to track confidence. [[Honesty Check]] is the agent-side discipline; [[Reading Agent Output Defensively]] is the principal-side discipline; this skill is the longitudinal data layer that makes both useful over time.

Connects to

• [[Cost of Confidence]] — the doctrine note this skill instantiates
• [[Honesty Check]] — should reduce Phase 1 capture frequency over time (fewer unhedged claims = fewer entries to resolve later)
• [[Reading Agent Output Defensively]] — the principal-side pattern that often triggers a Phase 1 capture
• [[Common Failure Modes]] — sister corpus tracking layer-level failures rather than confidence-level failures
• vault/memory/TRUST_DECAY.md — the ledger file
• Closing the Measurement Loop — the Stop hook that prompts a Phase 1 capture when a turn's confident claims went unrecorded
• /retro (forthcoming v0.3) — quarterly analysis that consumes this ledger