You're using AI to develop, test, and ship code. But how do you track what came from where — and who looked at what?
A year ago, "did a human verify this?" had an obvious answer. Now it's the question your customers, your auditors, and your future self are going to ask. Honest Cheetah is built to answer it.
The problem nobody's tooling was built for
Every tool you use assumes the thing that just stopped being true: that a person did the work.
An agent writes the code. An agent writes the tests. An agent runs the tests and reports green. A developer glances at the pull request — maybe — and merges. The commit says it was authored by that developer. The test run says it passed. Everything looks exactly like it did two years ago.
Except now you can't tell the difference between "a senior engineer tested this on the staging environment against the release build" and "an agent said it was fine." Both produce a green checkmark. Both look like verification. Only one of them is.
Git doesn't help. Authorship in Git is self-reported metadata. Agents commit under human identities. History gets rewritten. A signed commit proves someone had the key — not that a person wrote the code, and definitely not that anyone tested it.
What a chain of custody actually means
In a courtroom, evidence is only as good as the record of who handled it, when, and how. Software verification is about to be held to the same standard.
A chain of custody for software answers four questions about every claim that something works:
Who verified it?
A named human? An automated pipeline? An AI agent? All three are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and the record should say which.
How firsthand was it?
Did they run it themselves and watch it work? Or are they reporting what something else told them? Testimony has degrees. So does verification.
Against what, exactly?
Which build. Which commit. Which environment. "It passed" without a build number is a rumor about a version that may not be the one you shipped.
Can the record be trusted?
If the person — or the agent — reporting the result can also edit the record of the result, you don't have a record. You have a claim.
How Honest Cheetah records it
Verification facts are captured server-side. When a test run is recorded, Honest Cheetah stamps who recorded it, what they were (human, agent, or automation), when, and through which channel. The client can't supply those values. It can't forge them.
Runs are bound to builds. A result is linked to the GitHub Actions workflow run and the deployed environment it was executed against. "It passed" always has a build number attached.
Completed runs are immutable. Nobody edits a finished run — not the tester, not the admin, not the agent. Corrections are appended as new records that supersede the old ones. The original stays. The history stays.
The labels are derived, not declared. From those stored facts, Honest Cheetah computes plain-language labels at read time:
- Firsthand — a human ran it and recorded it themselves.
- Corroborated — more than one independent source agrees.
- Secondhand — recorded by someone reporting another's result.
- Hearsay — the result came from something that can't be independently checked.
- Substantiated / Declared / Unsubstantiated — how firmly the result is bound to actual code.
Nobody picks their own label. The record does.
"Hearsay" is not an insult
A test run labeled Hearsay isn't an error. It's a fact.
Most of your verification is going to be hearsay, and that's fine — you can't have a human personally re-run every test on every build. The point isn't to eliminate it. The point is to know which of your green checkmarks are which, so that when it matters — the release, the audit, the incident review — you can tell the difference between "verified" and "vibes."
Honest Cheetah presents provenance deadpan. No red. No alarms. The words carry the judgment, and you're smart enough to draw your own conclusions.
Who this is for
If you're a five-person team shipping a side project, you'll probably never open the provenance view — and that's fine; the free tier gives you the metrics and forecasting that matter more day to day.
If you're the person who has to sign your name to a release — for a customer, a regulator, an insurer, or a board — this is the part of the product built for you. As agents take over more of the writing and the testing, "who actually looked at this?" stops being a philosophical question and becomes the one you'll be asked under oath. Better to have the answer already written down.