Claude Temporal Awareness
An Agent Skill instructing Claude to use the Unix date command when working with dates, days of week, deadlines, and temporal calculations.
Claude's system prompt date can be stale or unavailable, leading to incorrect temporal reasoning. This skill ensures accuracy by running actual date commands before responding to date-sensitive queries. It handles both GNU date (Linux) and BSD date (macOS/FreeBSD), which have different syntax for date parsing and arithmetic.
Installation (Global)
Clone the repository to a permanent location and symlink the skill into your Claude's skills directory.
git clone --branch latest git@github.com:hodgesmr/temporal-awareness.git ~/temporal-awarenessSymlink to Claude's skills directory:
ln -sfn ~/temporal-awareness/skills/temporal-awareness ~/.claude/skills/temporal-awareness
Updating
cd ~/temporal-awareness && git fetch --tags --force && git checkout latest
Or pin a specific version:
cd ~/temporal-awareness && git fetch && git checkout 0.0.1
Usage
Once installed, Claude will automatically invoke the skill when it detects date-related queries. Here's an example interaction:
❯ Here is a section of a contract proposal: "The engagement will begin Monday, March 23 and
conclude Friday, April 3."
⏺ I notice this proposal specifies day-of-week for those dates. Let me verify if those dates
align correctly with the days mentioned.
⏺ Skill(temporal-awareness)
⎿ Successfully loaded skill · 1 tool allowed
⏺ Bash(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "2026-03-23" +%A && date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "2026-04-03" +%A)
⎿ Monday
Friday
⏺ The dates in the proposal are correct for 2026:
- March 23, 2026 is indeed a Monday
- April 3, 2026 is indeed a Friday
This is a 2-week engagement (10 business days).
❯ How would you update that section of the contract proposal to push the start and end dates
back one week?
⏺ Bash(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "2026-03-30" "+%A, %B %d" && date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" "2026-04-10"
"+%A, %B %d")
⎿ Monday, March 30
Friday, April 10
⏺ Updated language:
"The engagement will begin Monday, March 30 and conclude Friday, April 10."