---
title: "Verify the Agent Actually Showed It: Building Honest Tools for Agentic Workflows"
canonical: https://dxdev.com/blog/2026-07-23_agent-verification-before-claiming-success/
datePublished: 2026-07-23
---
The fix took 1h 5m on a Thursday morning. Agents kept claiming content was on screen that I never saw.

## The start command that opened nothing

The cause was the generic start command. The command silently opens nothing, and agents claimed content was on screen anyway.

## What I built instead

I built and shipped a CLI called `show`. Three behaviors matter:

- It opens the content in the session's own browser.
- It centers the window on the main monitor.
- It only claims success after verifying.

`show` has to confirm the result before it is allowed to say it worked. I confirmed it live.

## The opposite problem, same day

That evening I spent 15m on a popup. A session-viewer popup kept opening from `handoff-spawn`, and the page it showed was useless. Spawns still work, they just no longer pop a browser window.

The same day, one command opened nothing and another kept opening a useless page.

## Open ends

Two follow-ups were filed: compaction of the memory index, and an unidentified tab-closer.

## Honest agents, quiet tools

An agent can only be as honest as the tools it is given, and a tool that returns quietly on failure will make an honest agent say false things.