Half-Life — Decisions That Stopped Being True

Every contract a company is still living with was signed on assumptions: that a vendor's certification is current, that a price holds, that data stays in the EU. They were checked once, by someone who has since moved on, and never again. They rot quietly, and the organisation keeps acting on a conclusion that stopped being true months ago. Existing tools do not close this. Third-party risk management is an annual questionnaire and a certificate scan; alerting platforms deliver a feed of things that happened. Both watch the vendor. Neither watches the reasoning that justified the relationship — which is what actually breaks. Half-Life captures that reasoning and keeps testing it. CAPTURE. Upload the recording of the meeting where the decision was made. Speechmatics transcribes it with speaker diarization, and an extraction agent recovers the decision, its premises, who asserted each, how long each stays trustworthy, and a machine-runnable check. Premises no public source can settle are recorded as unprobeable rather than quietly assumed. RE-VERIFY. Each premise carries its own half-life. Bright Data fetches fresh evidence from the live web over Remote MCP, and anything verified longer ago than its half-life goes stale. ADJUDICATE. A cheap model screens every fetch with one question: did anything material change? Only genuine changes escalate to four frontier models from four different labs, asked the identical question. Panel agreement becomes the confidence score, and the system acts alone only when that panel is unanimous. RETRACT. Premises support justifications; justifications support decisions. When a premise fails, the failure propagates until the decision itself is retracted, with the contract clause it puts at risk and what that clause is worth. The idea is a truth maintenance system (Doyle 1979, de Kleer 1986) applied to LLM agents, which are otherwise monotonic: they accumulate and never retract, keeping no record of why they concluded anything.