Agent time awareness via timestamp injection

NousResearch/hermes-agent · cluster 693 · agent

Data as of

15 open items. Fix attempted, not merged.

The short answer

10open issues
5open PRs
22items grouped
Known?
Yes. 22 related items grouped here, 4 issues already closed.
Fix event
No fix has been merged to main. 3 PRs closed without merging; see the attempts below.
Tracker
The maintainers' tracker marks this unresolved. That is separate from the fix event.
Still open
10 issues and 5 PRs.

These issues and PRs collectively address the lack of current time awareness in LLM agents, proposing and implementing various mechanisms to inject live wall-clock timestamps into system prompts or per-turn message context. Both bugs reporting incorrect time behavior and feature requests for configurable timestamp injection are represented.

Open issues10

  • Issue#10421[Feature] Turn-level live time context for current date/time awareness
  • Issue#21784[Bug]: Why does the hermes-agent always get the time wrong?
  • Issue#27742[Bug] Agent lacks internal clock — no autonomous time awareness
  • Issue#27847[feature] 系统级时间戳注入,避免 Agent 估算偏差
  • Issue#49198Inject current wall-clock time into each turn to avoid repeated tool calls
  • Issue#49407Feature Request: Automatic Timestamp Injection in Message Context
  • Issue#54686Feature Request: Inject current_time into system prompt at every session turn
  • Issue#58813Bug: Cross-day session date not updated in system prompt
  • Issue#60765Model has no awareness of current time: system prompt uses date-only timestamp with no harness-level time-sync mechanism
  • Issue#62904LLM agent has no internal clock — requested infrastructure fix

Open PRs5

  • PR#32942fix(agent): inject turn-level current time context
  • PR#40252feat(prompt): inject current wall-clock time via ephemeral_system_prompt
  • PR#41425feat(agent): add timestamp context for replayed messages
  • PR#77101feat(agent): inject per-turn current time via ephemeral system tail (post-#102117 refit)
  • PR#85158feat(plugins): add live-time plugin for turn-level time awareness

3 PRs closed without merging

From the close comments: superseded by another PR 2 · other 1

  • #9784 feat(gateway): add optional inbound message timestamp prefix · superseded by another PR → bd7fc8f, 36ae958
  • #17531 docs: document tool-time advisory-not-enforcement principle · other → #17475
  • #26514 feat(gateway): optional per-message ISO-8601 timestamp prefix · superseded by another PR → bd7fc8f, 36ae958
Closed issues · 4
  • Closed#693Feature: Time-of-Day Context Injection — Ambient Temporal Awareness in System Prompt
  • Closed#9628[Feature]: configurable message timestamp prefix to prevent temporal drift in long-lived sessions
  • Closed#53061Static 'Conversation started' timestamp in system prompt becomes stale; agent gives wrong relative-time answers
  • Closed#62369Feature: Inject message timestamps into agent context for time awareness
How this cluster was grouped
  • Link evidence (partly structural links): some members are connected by structural evidence (shared changed files, or a closing/superseded reference); the rest are joined by an automated relevance judgement over their text.
  • Members outside that structural core may belong to a different underlying problem.
  • Pairwise link density 0.09: the share of item pairs that carry a link, counting a structural link in full and a relevance-only link at 0.36. 1.00 means every pair is linked.

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At a glance

Subsystem
agent
Closed issues
4
Attempts
3 PRs closed without merging

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