Second Brain / Industry term
Stale condition
An observable event, age, source change, conflict, or usage condition that invalidates a record's freshness claim or triggers re-evaluation.
A stale condition is the specific circumstance you record alongside a saved decision or note that would make it worth rechecking. You write it at the moment you save the record, while the reasoning is fresh, so a future review can tell at a glance whether anything important has changed. Say you decide to keep using a free tier of some tool. The stale condition might read: revisit if the team grows past five people or the vendor starts charging. Months later, when you ask your assistant to surface decisions that may have gone out of date, that one line is what lets it flag this record instead of leaving you to reread every note and guess.
Builder example
Different record types need different invalidation signals. A price may expire by time, a policy when its source version changes, and a decision when its assumption becomes false. Automated watchers can invalidate exact cases; ambiguous conditions can create a review queue.
Common confusion: A fixed expiry is one kind of stale condition, not its opposite. Some immutable historical records never become stale, though interpretations or downstream uses can.