Claude Code Skills vs deterministic verify commands — same checks, very different ergonomics

A peer showed me their verification pipeline last week. We were both running coding agents over real tickets, both wanted "did the agent actually finish the work" to be a hard gate, and we both had a thing for it. Theirs was a Claude Code Skill — a Markdown file with a few prompt fragments and tool permissions, invoked by the agent itself when it thought verification was warranted. Mine was a deterministic shell command pinned into a workflow step that runs every time, no agent judgment involved