# Time

> Current time and timezone.

- **MCP server name:** `time` (runs locally)
- **Prompt snippet:** [prompts/tools/time.md](../../prompts/tools/time.md)

## What It Is

A tiny tool that does one thing: tell the agent what time it is, in a given timezone. Trivial in description, essential in practice — LLMs don't know the current date, and conversations can span days or months.

## What It's Good For

- Checking today's date before timestamping anything (graph nodes, file names, messages)
- Building IDs that include a date component (`note_2026-05-20_…`)
- Reasoning about "recent" vs "old" in any context where the answer depends on now
- Timezone conversions when scheduling or interpreting log timestamps

## What It's Not Good For

- Anything that isn't time. It's a single-purpose tool.

## Known Gotchas

- **Don't assume the date.** Always check before using a date in something that gets stored — node IDs, message slugs, file names, journal entries. The agent's training cutoff is not "now."
- **Timezone defaults vary.** Specify the timezone explicitly when it matters (UTC for logs, local time for user-facing).