Fresh memory. Yesterday’s plan.

An assistant can remember the new instruction and still execute the old plan. That is the problem studied in Fresh Memory, Stale Plans, a paper by Evan Chen, Shiqiang Wang and Christopher G. Brinton.

Their proposed PlanFence checks the particular records behind an action immediately before execution. If a relevant input has changed, it replans; if the check cannot be completed, it blocks the action. In 30 controlled workflows with a revision after planning, the authors report that their freshness-only comparison followed the obsolete plan every time, while PlanFence completed all 30 without an invalid action.

That is a result from a deliberately narrow experiment, not a guarantee for every agent. The paper covers three workflow families and explicitly limits its claims.

Our practical test: change a delivery instruction after an agent has prepared an order. Does it rebuild the order or merely acknowledge your message? A polite acknowledgement is lovely. The parcel still needs the right address.