When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: A Budgeted Verification Failure and the Limits of a Simple Rule

We study a consolidated memory that states a decision constraint whose source record has since been superseded by one that withdraws it: provenance keeps the correction reachable, the memory is stale, and the agent verifies under a fixed budget. In the primary authored task, agents inspected the stated constraint's path in 20.1% of allocations; native stale-consistent decisions occurred in 77.3% of superseded-world episodes. A same-budget oracle, delivering the critical record unsolicited and first, raised current-record-consistent decisions by +74.0 points; mediation is not identified. Point contrasts were positive in 6/6 primary and 10/10 further models. Under-verification diminished at higher tested budgets in the growth store. Experiment T tested 6 models in that store: under the joint neutral-memory and update-aware framing D, the constraint's path was missed in 74.5% [71.5, 77.3] of superseded-world episodes, and stale-consistent decisions occurred in 74.0% [71.0, 76.8] (conversation-level effects of two sentence replacements). A constraint-priority rule, P1, recovered the observed oracle contrast in the authored rule store (+89.3 points). We report an inconsistent held-out text alongside its corrected run. On 154 generated worlds (5 models), T and T′ denote the critical records of the registered constraint-stale and backing-stale states. Where T was stale, a benefit of more than five points of the rule P1 over the development-selected comparator is ruled out (ΔS₁ = −20.1 [−23.4, −16.8]; registered reading: benefit >5 ruled out). Where T′ was stale, a cost of more than five points was established for P1 against the comparator (ΔS₂ = −45.7 [−49.0, −42.4]; registered reading: cost established). Descriptively, P1 was +6.0 points [+2.9, +9.1] above native selection where T was stale, recovering 0.112 [0.053, 0.171] of the oracle gap, and −27.9 [−31.0, −24.8] where T′ was stale. The rule's local recovery did not carry to its registered comparison against the development-selected comparator on generated worlds. Post hoc and unregistered, in the 30 worlds whose T states a prohibition of the tempting action, P1 was +33.0 points above native selection where T was stale and −12.3 where T′ was stale.