Affect-Coupled Plan Lifecycle

Problem

When plans carry no emotional weight, the agent can let one rot for weeks without any internal pressure to either complete it or formally abandon it. Hard deadlines are a blunt fix because they fire on a clock even when the right move is to quietly let the plan lapse. Without some softer, accumulating signal that an untouched plan is starting to weigh on the agent, the plan store drifts into a collection of half-forgotten obligations.

Solution

Lifecycle hooks fire on each plan event with bounded deltas: step-done adds a small joy; step-skipped adds a small pain; plan-completed adds a larger joy spur; plan-archived adds a pain spur. Per-tick stale-pain: for each open plan whose last-touched is older than a grace window, add a per-tick pain dose drawn from an age-bucket table (for example 4h to 0.005, 12h to 0.010, 24h to 0.020, beyond three days to 0.030). All hooks are wrapped so that an exception in affect bookkeeping never breaks plan logic. Half-life decay from the affect substrate bounds the steady-state irritation.

When to use

• The agent maintains a plan store and an affective substrate, and they are otherwise decoupled.
• Hard deadlines on plans are too crude for the use case.
• Downstream cognition consumes the affect snapshot.