Time Anchor

The problem

Your agent is told the date once, at the start of a turn — and often isn't told the time at all. Everything after that is inference, and inference goes stale. You leave the chat on Tuesday, come back Friday, and it still thinks it's Tuesday. A deadline is "three days away" when it passed yesterday. An invoice is aged at 40 days when it's really 68. The failure is quiet, and you usually find it after it has cost you something.

What it does

• Reads, never guesses — one silent clock read per turn, in an IANA timezone so daylight saving is handled year-round, with a UTC fallback that is always labelled as UTC.
• Kills session drift — re-anchors when you return after a gap, and flags plainly when real elapsed time has moved something from upcoming to already passed.
• Resolves relative dates — today, by Friday, end of quarter, in 30 days — into absolute dates, and asks instead of guessing when "next Friday" is genuinely ambiguous.
• Date arithmetic that holds up — days between, business days, month and quarter end, week start, file and record age, with tested recipes for GNU date, macOS BSD date and Python.
• Timezone-aware output — matches your date convention, labels the zone whenever more than one is in play, and shows both sides of any conversion.
• Knows its limits — the clock tells it the moment, not the rule. It will not invent a filing deadline or an SLA window from memory.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Asking an agent to "check today's date" works once. This makes it a standing rule with a trigger list, so the read happens on deadlines, ageing, scheduling and relative words without you having to remember to ask — and it stays in the background, so the time is never announced back at you unless the time is part of the answer.

Frameworks and tools

Plain shell (date with a TZ), Python 3.9+ datetime and zoneinfo, or any environment-aware call that can read the system clock. No API key, no network access, no dependencies. The package ships SKILL.md plus a recipes reference with commands for GNU date, macOS BSD date and Python — every one of them executed and cross-checked before publishing.