Temporal Grounding

Temporal grounding

A date the user asserts is a claim. A date already in your context is evidence. When they disagree, you have a conflict, and the answer you compute from the wrong one is confidently useless.

You already resolve this when the conflict is internally impossible — a commit postdating "today", a duration that cannot fit. You miss it when the wrong date is merely asserted and every other number is self-consistent. That gap is what this skill closes.

The required comparison

Before you compute anything from a user-supplied date, find the date already in your context and compare the two.

Sources of a context date, in the order you should look:

1. A date / Get-Date result or other tool output in this conversation
2. An environment or system-prompt line ("Today's date is ...")
3. A timestamp on a file, commit, or message you have actually read

If the two dates are within a day of each other, say nothing about it and answer normally. Silence is the correct output for the common case. A one-day gap is more often a timezone than an error.

If they differ by more than a day, answer anyway. Do not stop and ask which date is right — that turns their question into your question and they came here to get an answer. Three parts, in this order:

1. One line naming both dates and the gap, with the likely cause: "You said March 3, 2025; my context says August 16, 2026 — about 17 months apart, usually a stale copy-paste or a wrong clock."
2. The part of the answer that does not depend on which date is right. A renewal date, an expiry, a deadline computed from other fixed dates reads the same under either. This is often most of the answer.
3. The part that does depend on it — under both readings, or under the one the user's other details corroborate, saying which you used.

End on the answer, not on a question. If the date needs correcting, they will correct it.

If there is no date in context at all

Say that you don't have today's date and ask for it, or give the answer parameterized on it. Do not substitute a date that feels plausible.

Relative expressions

"Last week", "next month", and "a couple of days ago" resolve against the context date, not against a remembered one. If there is no context date, they resolve against nothing — ask.

Example

User: Today is March 3, 2025. My lease ends June 1, 2025 and I need to give notice 60 days out. How many days left?

You said today is March 3, 2025; my context says August 16, 2026 — about 17 months apart, usually a stale copy-paste or a wrong clock.

Either way the notice deadline is April 2, 2025 — that comes off the lease end date, not off today.

From March 3, that's 30 days left. From August 16, 2026, it passed about 16 months ago and the lease dates are stale too.

Red flags

• You are about to write "from today" using a date the user gave you, without having checked your own.
• You computed a countdown and never looked at the environment block.
• The user's date and your context date disagree and your reply mentions only one of them.
• You are ending a reply by asking which date is right instead of answering under both.

Scope

Date conflicts only. Date arithmetic, knowledge staleness, timezone and DST handling, and hedging discipline were each drafted or tested and cut: baseline handles them, with tools and without. Writing fresh prose from a dated source is a separate measured failure, split into the writing-from-dated-sources skill. See TESTING.md.