# Oracle

Band: established — Settled. Documented by a primary source and not seriously disputed.
Group: Verification and authority

An independent source of truth that can say whether an output is correct without a human reading it: a reference implementation, a differential comparison against a known-good tool, a property test, a type checker. The presence or absence of an oracle predicts more about how well agents do on a task than any topology or prompt does. Where one exists, verification is cheap and parallelism is safe. Where none exists, every gate on this page degrades into a model arguing that it is finished.

## See also

- [Verification gate](https://clickai.dev/legend/verification-gate)
- [LLM-as-judge](https://clickai.dev/legend/llm-as-judge)
- [Agentic engineering](https://clickai.dev/legend/agentic-engineering)
- [Self-reported green](https://clickai.dev/legend/self-reported-green)

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Full legend: https://clickai.dev/legend.md