Solving Hallucinations in Technical Writing with Triangular Feedback
The Problem: One Agent Can’t Check Its Own Work
Hallucinations thrive when a single agent writes, implements, and verifies its own documentation. There’s no adversarial pressure — the same biases that produced the hallucination will happily validate it.
The fix is what I call the Triangular Feedback Loop: three independent checkpoints that catch factual drift before it gets committed.
The Three Checkpoints
- Lead Author (e.g., Claude): Generates the initial specification and architectural rationale.
- External Auditor (e.g., Gemini): Audits the specification for factual accuracy and drift against the project registry.
- Proof-of-Work Gate (Tests): Verifies that what the documentation describes actually executes as described.
The Accountability Cycle
Every technical artifact goes through five phases:
- Framing: Define the goal and constraints upfront.
- Spec-First: No code is written until the spec is reviewed.
- Execution: The implementation agent executes the spec.
- Audit: An independent model reviews the implementation against the spec.
- Synthesis: Reflect lessons learned back into the session registry.
Why This Matters
Documentation isn’t a byproduct of development. When you’re working with agents across long-running projects, documentation becomes the source of truth that maintains architectural integrity across sessions. If that source of truth has hallucinations baked in, every downstream decision is compromised.
Using multiple models to cross-check each other is the simplest way to catch this before it compounds.