feat(gateway): inject current timestamp into user messages#5487
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willy-scr wants to merge 4 commits into
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feat(gateway): inject current timestamp into user messages#5487willy-scr wants to merge 4 commits into
willy-scr wants to merge 4 commits into
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Prepend a human-readable timestamp to every user message before passing it to the agent. The agent can then answer time-aware questions (e.g. "what day is it?") without spending a tool call on `date`. Format: [Current time: Monday, April 06, 2026 07:36 AM] Uses locale-aware strftime with en_US fallback for consistent English day/month names.
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This was referenced Apr 29, 2026
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Closing this as superseded by #17459/#17476. The need is real, but we do not want a separate gateway-only timestamp-prefix mechanism. The chosen direction is one core ephemeral runtime/user-message context path for current time + timezone, with time-sensitive tools also returning explicit advisory metadata when relevant (#17474). If there are useful tests or gateway adapter details here, please port them into the consolidated implementation rather than keeping this as a parallel feature flag. |
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Summary
Injects a human-readable timestamp at the top of every user message before it reaches the agent, so the agent always knows the current date and time without needing to invoke a tool call.
Format:
[Current time: Monday, April 06, 2026 07:36 AM]Why
Agents running long conversations often lose track of time. The only built-in mechanism is the
Conversation started:header, which becomes stale after minutes or hours of back-and-forth. Currently the agent must spend adatetool call just to answer "what time is it?" or "what day is today?" — wasting tokens and latency.This is especially important for:
What Changed
Core Injection (
gateway/run.py)Inside
_run_agent(), right beforeagent.run_conversation():display.gateway_timestampconfig (default:true)datetime.now()en_US.UTF-8for consistent day/month names (with graceful fallback)Monday, April 06, %Y %I:%M %p[Current time: ...]\n\nto the messageConfig Toggle (
hermes_cli/config.py)display.gateway_timestamp: truetoDEFAULT_CONFIGconfig.yaml— survives restartsSlash Command (
hermes_cli/commands.py+gateway/run.py)/timestamps(alias/ts) command — toggles injection on/offconfig.yamlDesign Decisions
datetime.now()instead of injecting into system prompten_US.UTF-8with try/except fallback_run_agent(gateway path)trueTesting
Manual testing on self-hosted instance:
_run_agentpath)en_USlocale (falls back to server default)/timestampstoggle works — ON/OFF states persist across messages and restartsdisplay.gateway_timestamp: falsecorrectly disables injection