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.

25 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.

• 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.
• Flow State — Enter an absorbed, intrinsically rewarding activity state when challenge matches skill and goals and feedback are clear, causing action and awareness to merge, self-monitoring to recede, and time perception to distort.
• 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.
• 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.