When should you scope, rather than remove, a verification instruction?

Scope a verification instruction to a specific step, rather than removing all verification instructions outright, when that particular step carries meaningfully higher stakes or risk than the rest of the task - somewhere a mistake would be especially costly to miss even given Opus 5's generally strong built-in self-checking.

This differs from a blanket, task-wide "double-check everything" instruction, which is the pattern Anthropic specifically advises against, since it compounds with the model's default behavior across every step rather than targeting the one place extra scrutiny is actually warranted.

In practice, this means identifying the specific high-stakes step - a financial calculation, a destructive action, a security-relevant check - and attaching an explicit verification instruction only there, while trusting Opus 5's default self-verification for the rest of the task.

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