No match is not proof that nothing happened.

Why incomplete evidence must stay indeterminate, even when an agent wants a yes-or-no answer.

A provider read can be incomplete because of pagination, permissions, rate limits, a timeout, or changes during the scan. An empty response is not a universal proof that an earlier write never happened.

Verify distinguishes verified, contradicted and indeterminate observations. This third state is deliberate. It lets a workflow retain uncertainty instead of turning a missing reference into a false failure or a false success.

The GitHub connector uses bounded reads. A known-ID check describes one resource; it does not establish repository-wide uniqueness. A paginated scan is not an atomic snapshot, and state can change after it is observed.

Use a new episode key when requesting a fresh observation. Reusing an existing episode key retrieves its original result and timestamp. This keeps a network retry from silently becoming a different assertion about newer provider state.

The agent still needs a workflow policy for what to do next: wait and reverify, restore a connection, or reconcile an existing resource. Verify returns that decision context and performs no corrective provider writes.