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Why Fornax?

The problem​

A coding agent tells you what it did in plain English: "all tests pass," "fixed," "done." That sentence is generated by the same model that just did the work — it is not an independent check. When the agent is wrong (a flaky test it didn't notice, an error it summarized away, a claim about a file it never actually re-ran), nothing else in the loop catches it unless a human happens to look.

This is a real, reproduced failure mode, not a hypothetical one. See the First finding walkthrough for an actual case: a Claude Code adapter bug caused every claim to silently resolve UNAVAILABLE (looked fine, verified nothing), and a separate real session produced a claim of "all tests passed" against evidence of a nonzero exit code — exactly the gap Fornax exists to catch.

What Fornax does about it​

Fornax doesn't ask the agent to grade its own homework, and it doesn't ask a second LLM to guess whether the first one is lying. It:

  1. Captures evidence immutably, before interpretation. Tool calls, exit codes, and transcript events are persisted append-only as they happen — not reconstructed afterward from what the agent says happened.
  2. Verifies deterministically. A verifier is a pure function: Claim + Evidence[] + RuntimeCapabilities → Finding. Same evidence, same claim, same finding — every time, replayable without a live agent session.
  3. Reports honestly when it can't tell. If the runtime doesn't expose the evidence a check needs, the verdict is UNAVAILABLE — never silently treated as a pass. See Claims, Evidence & Findings.

What Fornax is not​

  • Not a second opinion from another LLM. Verifiers are deterministic code, not another model guessing.
  • Not a trust score. There is no single number — a finding is one of five explicit states, always with a rationale attached.
  • Not a cloud service you have to trust with your code. The local critical path — capture, verify, status line, dashboard — has no cloud dependency. Cloud sync is opt-in and off by default (see Privacy & Redaction).

Who this is for​

Anyone running Claude Code or Codex on real work who wants a check on the agent's own narration — in the terminal (status line, fornax detail) or a local dashboard — without sending anything off their machine to get it.