XIII · Cognition & IntrospectionExperimental·

Affect-Coupled Plan Lifecycle

also known as Plan-Affect Hooks, Stale-Pain Bucketing, Felt-Stakes Plans

Wire small bounded affect bumps to plan-step lifecycle events and accumulate age-bucketed stale-pain on untouched plans so plans gain felt stakes without hard deadlines.

Context

A team is running a long-lived agent that already keeps two separate things: a store of plans or to-do items the agent has committed to, and an affective substrate that tracks small bounded scalars like joy and pain across ticks. The two systems coexist but do not influence each other. Plans are just cognitive items the agent can pick up or set down at will, with no felt reward for finishing them and no felt cost for letting them sit.

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.

Forces

  • Affect deltas must stay small or they overwhelm the substrate.
  • Stale-pain must be bounded or the agent enters permanent irritation.
  • Hooks must be best-effort: an exception in affect must not break plan lifecycle.
  • Bucketing by age makes the pressure curve interpretable rather than smooth-but-mysterious.

Example

A long-running personal agent maintains a small plan store but routinely lets plans rot for weeks. There is no felt pressure to finish or formally abandon. The team adds Affect-Coupled Plan Lifecycle: step-done bumps joy by 0.05, step-skipped bumps pain by 0.10, plan-completed adds 0.40 joy, plan-archived adds 0.30 pain. Each tick, plans untouched past four hours accumulate pain from an age-bucket table. The agent starts closing stale plans on its own — sometimes by finishing them, sometimes by archiving with a note — because rolling stale-pain becomes uncomfortable.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

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.

What this pattern forbids. Plan-affect hooks must use bounded deltas no larger than the substrate's per-event cap, must be best-effort (an affect exception cannot break plan lifecycle), and stale-pain accumulation cannot exceed the half-life-bounded steady-state of the affect substrate.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • complementsEmotional State Persistence★— Track the agent's affective state as bounded, decaying scalars across ticks so reasoning can react to its own emotional load instead of treating each turn as emotionally blank.
  • complementsTodo-List-Driven Autonomous Agent★— Have the agent author a plan file (e.g. todo.md) early in the run, tick items as it completes them, and re-inject the remaining plan into context; the file is durable plan and working memory.

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Used in frameworks

References

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