Stale condition

A stale condition is the specific circumstance you record alongside a saved decision or note that would make it worth rechecking, so a later review knows exactly when the saved answer may no longer hold.

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 Months later, when you ask your assistant to surface decisions that may have gone out of date, that one line is what lets it flag this record instead of leaving you to reread every note and guess.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

If you want an assistant to keep a knowledge base trustworthy over time, it needs a way to tell which records are still safe to rely on. A stale condition gives it a concrete test to check against the current situation. Ask the assistant to scan your saved decisions and list the ones whose stale conditions now appear to be met, and it can hand you a short review queue instead of a pile of undated notes. Records without a stale condition quietly age into guesses no one trusts.

Common confusion: A stale condition is a trigger for review, not an expiration date. An expiration date assumes a record goes bad on a fixed calendar day. A stale condition ties freshness to a real change in the world, such as a price increase or a team passing a certain size, so the record stays valid until that change occurs.