Scenario vs test

McCarthy’s vocabulary shift: scenarios are external holdout behaviors; “passing” becomes satisfaction over trajectories.

In factory vocabulary (Justin McCarthy, StrongDM), a test often means something in the codebase the agent can rewrite. A scenario is an external holdout: a description of observable behavior, not implementation detail, kept where the agent cannot quietly weaken it.

Similarly, passing is brittle; satisfaction is framed as the fraction of trajectories that meet user intent—closer to how we judge real products than a single boolean.

See also: Validation harness, Compound correctness.