Cue-Triggered Deferred Action

Primes about commitments bound to a future cue rather than executed immediately: callbacks, implementation intentions, and prospective memory wait latently for a trigger, while backtracking, race conditions, and time-of-check-to-time-of-use flaws expose what breaks when state shifts in the gap between binding and firing.

27 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Automaticity — Execute a trigger-to-output pathway with little contemporaneous stepwise supervision, gaining speed and low control cost while sacrificing inspectability, interruptibility, and rapid adaptation.
• Backtracking — Extend a partial solution one step at a time and reverse the most recent commitment as soon as a constraint proves it cannot succeed, preserving earlier work.
• Callback — A named action handed off in advance, to be invoked later by someone else when a specified condition arises, releasing the registrant from synchronous waiting.
• Change Notification — Advance warning, directed at those who depend on a system, that it is about to change in a way they need lead time to prepare for.
• Cue Outcome Decoupling — A cue that once reliably tracked an outcome has its coupling broken, while the cue-following behavior persists and grows more harmful the better it tracks the now-decoupled cue.
• Custody Transfer — A discrete moment at which responsibility for something passes from one holder to another, releasing the first and binding the second through an explicit triggering act.
• Decision Cycle Subordination — A slower actor's decision cycle becomes forced to respond to a faster actor's tempo, and responding faster deepens the subordination rather than escaping it.
• Evolutionary Trap — An agent follows a once-reliable cue more eagerly the stronger it is, straight into harm, because the environment changed and the cue-value coupling broke while the cue-response did not.
• Expectation Violation — An active prediction or schema specifies what should occur; an incompatible realization crosses a mismatch threshold and triggers surprise, reorientation, or repair, making the violated expectation diagnostically visible.
• Frame Problem — After a change, the challenge of bounding which facts now need re-derivation and which persist by default, without re-checking everything.
• Habit — A cue-triggered, automatically executed action sequence that persists under outcome devaluation.
• Implementation Intention — Pre-binding a specific future cue to a specific action so that at execution time the cue triggers the behavior without re-deliberation.
• Lazy Evaluation — Defer work until its result is actually demanded.
• Logging — Record events as they occur, append-only, for inspection after the fact.
• Memoing — Producing a parallel, contemporaneous, durable record of the in-flight reasoning that generates an artifact, so the trajectory survives alongside the artifact.
• Mission Command — Centralize intent and decentralize execution, holding the slowly-evolving why at the top while delegating the rapidly-evolving how to the edge where information is freshest.
• Orchestration — A directing control locus selects, assigns, orders, and adapts heterogeneous components as one execution, managing their interfaces and timing so their joint behavior realizes an outcome none is responsible for producing alone.
• Portable Context Bundle — A behaviour-unit carries the context it was defined in, resolving against its definition-time environment rather than the ambient one at use.
• Presupposition Smuggling — A communicative move binds a surface action to an embedded premise so that engaging the surface ratifies the premise without argument.
• Prospective Memory — An intended future action is encoded paired with a triggering cue, persists latently without rehearsal, and is retrieved and executed when a parallel cue-detection process fires.
• Race Condition — The outcome of a system depends on the uncontrolled relative timing of concurrent actions on shared state, so the order effects land — not the actions — determines the result.
• Rehearsal — A system keeps a high-stakes capability warm by repeatedly re-running the whole action under near-live conditions, with feedback between iterations.
• Script — A stored representation of a familiar situation as a temporally and causally ordered sequence of events with role-slots, props, and conditions, against which encounters are interpreted and deviations detected as breaches.
• Suspension — A prepared element persists into a changed context, becomes dissonant, then resolves by a small move.
• Thick Description — Record a phenomenon together with the surrounding context that makes its meaning recoverable, not just the bare surface event.
• Threshold-Triggered Rule Activation — A continuous observable crossing a threshold flips a dormant rule to active.
• Time-Of-Check To Time-Of-Use Flaw — A precondition verified at one instant authorizes an action taken at a later instant, and the relevant state changes in the gap between them, so the defect lives in the temporal binding between check and use rather than in either operation.