Statements of future intention and statements of completed action are often treated as differing only in tense. This paper argues they differ in kind. Drawing on speech act theory, it shows that “I will do X” is a commissive, whose felicity depends on the speaker's present sincerity rather than on any future outcome, while “I did X” is an assertive, immediately evaluable as true or false against an existing state of the world. This distinction explains an asymmetry that signaling theory then accounts for economically: an unrealized commitment costs nothing to state and nothing extra to fake, placing it close to cheap talk, while a completed, inspectable artifact is costly to produce and disproportionately costly to fabricate, making it a more reliable signal under standard separating-equilibrium logic. The paper then turns to possible-selves theory to resolve an apparent tension: future self-representations are not psychologically empty, and do real motivational work for the person who holds them, even though they remain epistemically inert for an outside evaluator who cannot verify them from the utterance alone. The paper's final claim is a restriction on its own argument: that a claim has passed from unverifiable commitment to inspectable artifact changes what can be evaluated, not whether the evaluation will be favorable. A demonstrated artifact can still be wrong, weak, or refuted. What changes is the question a critic is entitled to ask. ( direct link )