The check is two-part and neither part is a vibe. First the answer has to be the right shape — the fields you asked for, the types you asked for, the totals adding up. Then, where it matters, a second model reads the answer against the request and scores whether it actually did the job. Only answers that pass both are returned.
What happens after a failure is yours to set, per workflow. A customer-facing agent might retry once and climb immediately. A nightly batch job might retry three times and never climb at all, because nobody is waiting and the cheap model gets there eventually. These numbers live in your policy file, not in our heads.
Some decisions should never be fully automatic, and we would rather say so out loud than quietly automate them. Those route to a human-review queue with the agent's working attached, so the person deciding can see what the machine thought and why it wasn't trusted.
Everything is written down as it happens: the decision, the model that made it, the verification result, the retry count, and the clause in your policy that authorised the outcome. When somebody asks in six months why an agent did something, the answer is a query, not an investigation.