Context Freshness

10-Second Overview

CL maintains context freshness by tracking the relationship between canonical summaries and the constraints they were written against. When constraints change, summaries written against older versions become stale. CL manages this automatically.

How CL Maintains Freshness

CL always prefers the freshest available context. When fresh context exists, it is used automatically. If fresh summaries are available, the model receives current context and no trust degradation occurs. No developer action is required on the normal path.

When All Summaries Are Stale

If no fresh summaries exist for a context type, CL falls back to the stale ones rather than surfacing nothing. In this case the runtime degrades the trust signal for the execution. The output is still returned. The execution receipt records stale_summary_count and stale_context_enforced under verification_dimensions to indicate stale context was used.

See Execution Receipts for receipt field details.

What To Do When Stale Context Is Enforced

Stale enforcement means the workflow's memory is behind its current constraint state. The appropriate response is to re-run the workflow. A fresh run will produce new summaries against the current constraint versions, resolving the staleness automatically. If stale signals appear consistently, it may indicate constraints are being updated frequently without corresponding workflow re-runs.

Relationship to Verification

Stale context is a context integrity violation when the fallback path is taken. It is treated the same as other context integrity violations.

See Verification for full violation type reference.

Runtime Contract

Documents the behavioral guarantees enforced during execution.

Execution Receipts

Describes per-step execution artifacts including verification results.

Verification