What Are Verification Gates?
TL;DR: You cannot give an AI agent a 10-step master prompt and walk away. Verification gates are intentional pauses baked into a phased Prompt Pack to ensure the agent hasn't broken the state, schema, or routing before it builds the next feature.
The fastest way to ruin a codebase is to let an AI agent stack new features on top of broken logic.
If an agent quietly messes up your authentication state in step two, and you let it proceed to step three, four, and five, you are building a house on a cracked foundation. By the time you notice the bug, the AI has tangled the broken auth logic into every route in your app.
Verification gates prevent this. Tools like Zalcro generate phased Prompt Packs that instruct you to stop and run specific manual tests (e.g., "Verify the user can log out and the session token clears"). You only feed the agent the next prompt after the gate is cleared.
Zalcro generates phased Prompt Packs with built-in verification gates, so you know exactly what to test before giving the agent its next prompt.