Gates & checks
Three kinds of things happen to an artifact in a pipeline: steps do, gates judge, checks verify. The doctrine in one line: humans approve at gates; machines preserve between them.
The three kinds
| Kind | Who acts | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Step | The pipeline | Transforms the artifact — renders, removes a background, upscales, exports. |
| Gate | A human (or a hard vision verdict) | Judges what machines cannot decide alone: is this good, what category is it, does the text match. A failed hard gate fails the run loudly. |
| Check | The platform, automatically | Verifies that a property someone approved still holds after a step that could destroy it — and records the measurement on the artifact. |
Recorded, or it didn’t happen
A check appears on an artifact only when something actually evaluated it — there are no permanently-“pending” placeholder checklists. And approval is downstream of the record: an artifact with a failed check is not approvable (reject or re-render), and a real check that never recorded blocks approval until it does.
The rule exists because the alternative was observed: an artifact once reached approved while visually destroyed, under a reassuring checklist that had never run. Every check you see on an artifact is a measurement, with numbers — provenance of quality, not just of origin.
Checks in the wild
The export step measures that an approved cutout’s transparency survived the print pipeline (soft-edge alpha in versus out). The text gate’s verdict lands on the artifact with what OCR actually read. Consistency checks flag an item whose processing contradicts its declared render mode.