live-time

The problem it kills

Hermes stamps Conversation started: ... once, when the session is created — and never refreshes it. Keep one conversation going for a day or a week and the model is quietly stuck at session-start time: it calls yesterday "today", misses that it's 3 a.m., and can't tell a five-minute reply from a two-day gap.

live-time re-injects the real, current, timezone-aware time on every LLM call, so that whole class of confusion disappears. Tracking issue: #10421.

Before → after, in an ordinary cross-day session:

You        Let's keep going with option B.
Assistant  Sure — drafting the migration plan now.

          ······ you close the laptop; the session stays alive ······

You        OK, continue.

Assistant (without live-time)  Above, you said "today we'll finish" — so …
                               ← still convinced it's the same afternoon

Assistant (with live-time)     It's been about two days; picking up from option B,
                               here's the next step — and it's 11:40 p.m. your time,
                               so I'll keep this short.

Install

From the official catalog (recommended):

hermes plugins install live-time --enable
hermes gateway restart        # the plugin loads on gateway start

Straight from this repo:

hermes plugins install chenfeijiang95-ui/hermes-live-time --enable
hermes gateway restart

Manual (development): drop the repository contents into <HERMES_HOME>/plugins/live-time/ and restart. No build step — it's plain Python.

Verify in 5 seconds: ask the agent "what time is it right now?" — it should answer accurately without calling any tool. Or look for the injected marker in the request:

[LIVE-TIME] Now: 2026-09-19 16:32:56 (Weekday 6/7, Sat), TZ UTC+8.

What the model actually sees

One small, self-describing block, appended on the user-message side of every request:

[LIVE-TIME] Now: 2026-09-19 16:32:56 (Weekday 6/7, Sat), TZ UTC+8.
Injected by live-time plugin at THIS LLM call's moment. Use THIS as the
authoritative current time for any today/now/elapsed/date judgment. Ignore
the 'Conversation started' timestamp in the system prompt for anything
except session-creation facts.

The wording is deliberate: the block claims authority over "now", and explicitly tells the model to treat the session-start stamp as history rather than as the present.

Design guarantees

Guarantee	Why it matters
Ephemeral	Appended to the request only — never written into the cached system prompt, so prompt caching is unaffected.
Read-only	Touches no transcript, no memory store, no network. Nothing is persisted.
Zero dependencies	Standard library + PyYAML (already shipped with Hermes).
No internal imports	Nothing from `hermes_cli`/`agent/*`, so upstream refactors can't break it.
Fails open	Unreadable config, unknown timezone, missing `zoneinfo` data → falls back to system-local time instead of raising.
Single hook	`pre_llm_call` and nothing else — one line in `register()`.
Cheap	A few string operations per turn. No I/O in the hot path.

Timezone resolution

Resolved fresh on each call, in this order:

HERMES_TIMEZONE environment variable
top-level timezone key in <HERMES_HOME | ~/.hermes>/config.yaml (parsed with yaml.safe_load, so inline comments and nesting are handled)
local system timezone (rendered as an offset, e.g. TZ UTC+8)

Weekday labels are English abbreviations (Mon … Sun) on purpose: the injected block stays identical no matter what locale the rest of the conversation is in.

Profile caveat. When HERMES_HOME is unset, step 2 falls back to the default home's configuration file — so a non-default profile's timezone key is only picked up when Hermes exports HERMES_HOME for that profile, which is what the normal startup path does.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
Agent still quotes a stale date	Plugin isn't loaded — run `hermes plugins list` (look for `live-time`, status enabled), then `hermes gateway restart`.
Time is right but the timezone is off	`HERMES_TIMEZONE` unset and `config.yaml` has no `timezone` key → it's using system-local. Set either one.
Timezone ignored for a specific profile	See the profile caveat above: that profile must export `HERMES_HOME`.
Nothing in the request at all	Another plugin or an older Hermes build. Check `hermes plugins doctor .` in the plugin directory.

Tests

pytest tests/test_live_time.py -v

Requires pytest in your environment.

Covers the injected-block shape, the timezone resolution order, and the invalid-timezone fallback path.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

What it adds

Hooks 1

README