Problem
When you ask OpenClaw to "remind me in 30 minutes" or "set an alarm for 3pm", it often gets the time wrong. The agent guesses the current time instead of knowing it precisely.
Why this happens
The cron scheduler requires exact timestamps (ISO-8601 format), but the agent only sees the timezone in its system prompt — not the actual current time.
The system prompt says to call session_status to get the time, but even that tool only returned human-readable time like:
🕒 Time: Friday, February 6th, 2026 — 2:32 PM (America/New_York)
This isn't useful for calculating "30 minutes from now" or formatting the ISO-8601 timestamp that the cron scheduler requires. The agent ends up guessing.
Expected behavior
When I say "remind me in 30 minutes", the reminder should fire in exactly 30 minutes, not at some random time the agent guessed.
Related
Problem
When you ask OpenClaw to "remind me in 30 minutes" or "set an alarm for 3pm", it often gets the time wrong. The agent guesses the current time instead of knowing it precisely.
Why this happens
The cron scheduler requires exact timestamps (ISO-8601 format), but the agent only sees the timezone in its system prompt — not the actual current time.
The system prompt says to call
session_statusto get the time, but even that tool only returned human-readable time like:This isn't useful for calculating "30 minutes from now" or formatting the ISO-8601 timestamp that the cron scheduler requires. The agent ends up guessing.
Expected behavior
When I say "remind me in 30 minutes", the reminder should fire in exactly 30 minutes, not at some random time the agent guessed.
Related