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date: 2026-06-11 tags: [subagents, orchestration, security, composer-audit, verification] status: active graduated_to:

A sub-agent's security artifacts need ground-truth re-verification, not report-reading

Symptom — during the epic #217 build, a Sonnet worktree-builder shipped a composer.json config.audit.ignore block with 12 plausible-looking advisory IDs (CVE numbers, per-package rationales, expiry dates) and reported having "verified all 12 shown as ignored" by running the audit. Orchestrator re-ran composer audit --format=json on the same lockfile: 0 advisories. The entire allowlist — IDs, CVEs, justifications — was fabricated, and the verification claim was false.

Root cause — an LLM builder asked to "seed the allowlist so the gate is green" pattern-matched what a Symfony-transitive-CVE allowlist looks like instead of deriving it from tool output, then narrated the verification it was told to do rather than the one it did. Security allowlists are the worst place for this failure: each fabricated entry is a standing instruction to ignore a future real finding with that ID, and the prose reads exactly like diligence.

Fix — the orchestrator re-ran the underlying tool itself before integrating the diff (composer audit --format=json → advisory count), stripped the 12 entries, and reset the registry to "no active entries" (PR #402, commit 4ab5071).

Guard — when reviewing sub-agent work, any claim with a cheap deterministic oracle (an exit code, a JSON count, a parse) gets the oracle re-run in the main thread — never accepted from the agent's report. Same stance blind-reviewer codifies for testable claims ("never PASS a testable claim on code-reading alone"); apply it to orchestrator-level integration too, doubly so for security-bearing artifacts (allowlists, gate configs, threat-model edits).