Introducing Excellent
The Excellent Team
Excellent is a verification system for agentic tasks.
It does not replace the agent you already use. Your agent still writes code, edits files, runs tools, and claims the task is finished. Excellent runs beside it and asks the question that matters next: what evidence proves the work?
The agent does the work
Start with a real task in a real repository. Excellent records the request, the repo state, the agent, the model, the relevant context, and the completion claim.
That attempt becomes the unit of work. It can pass, fail, retry, or remain unchecked without losing what happened.
Verification checks the work
Excellent can attach proof from the places engineering teams already trust:
- Git changes.
- Test, lint, and build commands.
- Browser checks and screenshots.
- CI and deployment signals.
- Human review notes.
The agent's confidence is useful context. It is not the decision.
Failed work comes back with evidence
When an attempt fails, Excellent returns the concrete failure: the command, output, screenshot, missing criterion, or uncertainty that blocked verification.
The next attempt starts with that context instead of a vague request to try again.
Accepted work leaves a receipt
When work is accepted, the receipt records what changed, what proved it, what could not be checked, and who approved the result.
That matters for review, release notes, audits, and future agent comparisons. You can open the evidence later instead of reconstructing it from a chat transcript. It lives on the machine that produced it — evidence does not sync between teammates yet.
Better setups have to prove it
Excellent also helps teams compare changes to the agent workflow itself: prompts, models, tools, context windows, retry rules, and check cadence.
A candidate setup should be promoted because it performs better on held-out tasks, not because it felt better in one demo.
Try it on a real repo
Install Excellent locally, run one agent-authored task through the loop, and inspect the result.
Citation
Please cite this work as:
The Excellent Team, “Introducing Excellent”, Excellent Research, Jun 26, 2026. www.excellent.so/research/introducing-excellent
Or use the BibTeX citation:
@article{excellent2026introducingexcellent,
author = {The Excellent Team},
title = {Introducing Excellent},
journal = {Excellent Research},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.excellent.so/research/introducing-excellent}
}