-- What the judge expected to find, written down BEFORE it saw the agents' output. -- -- Self-Play Reward Hacking of Reference-Free Judges (arXiv 2607.05904) measured -- a judge's pass rate climbing 0.72 -> 0.94 across rounds while the answers -- stayed 0.20 correct: a judge that reads the candidate first is argued into -- the candidate's framing. Cross-family judges and ensembles did not help. -- The one mitigation that did was making the judge commit to its own answer -- before seeing the candidate (false-positive rate 0.719 -> 0.012). -- -- Our analogue: one tool-free round on the condition alone, producing a -- verification plan — which files, strings, tests would show MET — that the -- verifying prompt then holds the judge to. Stored beside the verdict so an -- operator can see whether the checks the judge ran are the ones it said it -- would run, and NULL on every verdict written before the round existed. ALTER TABLE mission_phase_evaluations ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS expectation TEXT; COMMENT ON COLUMN mission_phase_evaluations.expectation IS 'The judge''s verification plan, committed from the condition alone before it read the evidence; NULL when the judge had no commit round.';