Snort has offered additional plug-ins to do similar things for years, and was the first network-based IDS I remember that addressed the many challenges faced by any tool trying to do that sort of analysis and response. Microsoft Research has a product called Shield and Generic Application-Level Protocol Analyzer. This particular project claimed research success across 10 protocols at speeds up to 60Mbps, while the analyzers remained memory-safe and DoS-resilient. There's even an entire company, Bluelane dedicated to this idea. I reviewed their ServerShield appliance in 2006 (called PatchPoint back then) and gave it a pretty good ranking. None of these solutions are perfect. They all have their limitations.

But it begs the question, what should you be planning to do different as the time to patch before the exploit continues to decrease?

I, only slightly humorously, believe that we should fight back with one-second patch engines. I don't think anyone should get too concerned about automatic exploit engines. I mean the bad guys are being pretty successful without them. Second, if they do ever become a reality, the security defense community has been working on this threat for a long time, and appropriate solutions would come out pretty quickly. Instead of being worried about future attacks, most security administrators should focus on being more consistent on the stuff they can do today to lower security risk.