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Time awareness

An LLM has no sense of time. It can't tell what day it is, or whether data it fetched earlier is stale. Time awareness gives the agent the current time, and marks every tool result with the time it was produced. This page covers what the feature does and how to turn it off. It is for app developers who configure Quick Apps. It assumes you know orchestration.

What it does​

  • The current time on every turn. The current UTC time is added to the conversation at each user turn, so the agent can answer time questions without a tool call.
  • Time zone conversion. The current_timestamp tool converts the time to a time zone, such as Asia/Tokyo. The conversion runs on the server, which avoids model errors with daylight saving time.
  • Fresh or stale results. Every tool result is marked with the time it was produced. The agent can compare it with the current time, and decide whether to call the tool again.

What the agent sees​

On the first turn, the time arrives as if the agent had called the tool:

[user]      What day is it?
[assistant] (tool_call: current_timestamp -> {})
[tool]      2026-03-24T14:30:00+00:00 (UTC, source=default)
[assistant] Today is Tuesday, March 24, 2026.

On later turns, the earlier times stay as they were, and a new one is added. A tool result carries its time at the end:

{"temperature": 22, "unit": "celsius"}
[Timestamp: 2026-03-24 14:30:00 UTC]

These result marks are shown only to the model. They aren't saved in the conversation or shown to the user.

Configure it​

Time awareness is on by default. features.timestamp takes one field, injection_strategy, whose only value is tool_call, so {} and the default are the same.

{ "features": { "timestamp": { "injection_strategy": "tool_call" } } }

To turn it off for an app, set "timestamp": null. Setting "features": null turns it off too, along with the other feature defaults.

Further reading​