Policy & Governance for AI Agents Market: Validators Should Judge, Not Auto-Remediate

Todd Linnertz argues that AI validators in developer toolchains should only judge outputs and not perform automatic remediation. He introduces and adopts the term "verification debt" to describe the quality gap between machine-produced outputs and production-ready software, and highlights testing patterns like inner-loop vs outer-loop checks and shadow testing. Linnertz criticizes validator designs (citing Sonar's "Solve" stage) that collapse finding and fixing into one step because they erase audit trails, change the security posture, and hide authorship of changes. He recommends separating the validator (which emits a verdict) from a remediation agent (which proposes fixes) and enforcing a frozen baseline promotion gate so fixes must clear the same checks as any other change. He notes the industry has not yet settled where remediation should live.