A discipline for checks that can't be fooled by the same mistake that produced the work.
Abstract. When the author of a piece of work — an LLM, or a human moving fast — can be confidently and silently wrong, the usual defenses fail quietly: a test written from the same mistaken assumption as the code passes while the code is broken. MFIC is the class of check that escapes this trap, defined by four properties that must all hold at once. It is Mechanical (cases swept by machine, not hand-picked, so nothing is silently omitted), Falsifiable (each case genuinely bites when the work is wrong, on inputs you couldn't pre-arrange to pass), Independent (its verdict comes from the contract or the data — a source the producer doesn't control — which is segregation of duties restated for software), and a real Control (it holds the authority to block the bad outcome, not merely log it). This is the COSO / Sarbanes-Oxley model of internal co