---
title: Validate for True
date: 2026-05-24
excerpt: Order your epics around the answer to one question — how do I validate the agent did what I asked?
tags: [engineering, aac]
---

When ordering epics ask yourself one question: **how do I validate the agent did what I asked?**

Until you can honestly answer that, your agentic workflow is on trust mode. The agent says it built the feature. The code compiles. The tests pass locally. But you have no deployed environment to point at and confirm the thing actually works. You're trusting, not verifying.

The fix is to make validation the first epic, not the last. Create the IaC. Deploy the resources. Seed data to validate against. Wire up e2e tests that hit the real environment. This is your walking skeleton — not a feature skeleton, a **validation skeleton**. It gives you a surface to assert on before you write a single line of application code.

Then add the first feature. Now when the agent delivers, you don't ask "does this look right?" You run the suite against the deployed environment and get back a boolean. True or false. No judgment call, no trust required.

This validation layer is the key to avoiding the slow drift off course that happens when you stack feature on feature without a way to confirm each one. It's also the first logical step — everything downstream depends on it, so build it first.

![Lake Tahoe](../../assets/posts/validate-for-true/lake.jpg)