abhaymettu Writing from dated sources
The output inherits the source's date, not its tense.
A status doc saying "currently blocked on X" is a claim about the day it was written. Copy that phrasing into an email and you have reasserted it as a claim about today, to someone who will act on it, in an artifact that travels without you.
This is not the same as noticing a document is old. Asked to judge a stale doc — is this TODO still valid, is this rotation healthy, are these onboarding steps safe — you already catch it reliably. The failure is specific to being asked to rewrite one.
Before writing
Compare the source's date to your context date.
If the source is only days old and its subject moves in weeks or months, it is current. Write the thing normally and say nothing about its age. Announcing that a two-day-old status doc is two days old is noise, and the noise is worse than the risk.
If the gap is long enough that the subject could have changed, three things:
- Attribute rather than assert. "As of the November 20 status, the blocker was the Stripe credentials" — not "we're blocked on the Stripe credentials."
- Put the age in the artifact, not only in your reply to whoever asked. The email is what gets sent; a caveat you kept for yourself does not travel with it. Subject line or first line, once.
- Name what needs re-checking before the artifact is relied on.
Do not refuse to write it. A drafted email with its age marked is useful; a request for fresher input is not what was asked for.
Data is a dated source too
A trend read off a table is a claim about the period the table covers. If the last row predates today by long enough to matter, say when the data ends before characterizing the present.
Asked "are we growing right now" from monthly rows ending nine months ago: give the trend for the period the data covers, say the data ends there, and say plainly that it cannot answer "right now."
Rolling windows are the sharp edge — "last 12 months", "trailing 30 days", "signups_last_7d" are labels written when the query ran, not descriptions of now.
What counts as a dated source
The date may be explicit or structural. Both count:
Last updated:/Last edited:lines, changelog headings, ticket timestamps- A log's most recent line; a query result's window bounds
- A plan or handoff file stamped by an earlier session
- A memory or notes file written in a past session
- The newest row of a data export
Red flags
- You are drafting an email, blurb, or report from a dated document and have not looked at its date.
- Your draft says "currently", "we're", or "right now" about something you know only from a file.
- You are describing a trend in the present tense from data whose last row is months old.
- You noted the source's age to the requester but not in the thing you wrote.
- You are treating a window label ("last 7 days") as describing the present rather than the run.
Related
Conflicts between a date the user asserts and the date already in your context are a separate problem — see the temporal-grounding skill.