claude-time

May 3, 2026 · View on GitHub

Stop hearing "tonight" at breakfast.

A zero-config Claude Code plugin that injects live local time + timezone into every prompt and stamps every Claude response with a visible [HH:MM AM/PM TZ] marker.

Why

Claude's context window has no clock. Without help, the model guesses the time from stale conversation history — leading to "let's deploy tonight" when it's 9 AM, or "what did you do this morning" when it's already 11 PM.

claude-time fixes this with a single shell hook. No daemons, no subscriptions, no API keys.

What it does

Every time you submit a prompt, the plugin runs:

date '+%A, %Y-%m-%d %I:%M %p %Z'

…and injects the result into Claude's context as a UserPromptSubmit additional-context block. It also instructs Claude to prepend [HH:MM AM/PM TZ] to every response so you can see when the model's last words actually landed (useful when long tasks stall).

Example injected context:

Current local time is Sunday, 2026-05-03 12:01 PM CDT (UTC 2026-05-03T17:01:06Z).
Use this for any time-of-day language…

Message stamping: BEGIN every response with the marker `[12:01 PM CDT]` on its own first line…

Install

/plugin marketplace add nexusbuildsai/claude-time
/plugin install claude-time@claude-time-marketplace

Manual

Drop the contents of hooks/hooks.json into your ~/.claude/settings.json under the hooks.UserPromptSubmit array.

Requirements

  • jq (pre-installed on macOS, apt install jq on Linux)
  • date (POSIX, ships with every Unix)

That's it. No Python, Node, Docker, API keys.

Customization

Edit hooks/hooks.json to tweak the format string. Common variants:

  • 24-hour clock: change %I:%M %p → %H:%M
  • ISO date only: change %A, %Y-%m-%d %I:%M %p %Z → %Y-%m-%d
  • Add seconds: %I:%M:%S %p
  • Add weekday number / day of year: see man date

License

MIT

Roadmap

  • Optional Stop-hook log file (~/.claude/claude-time.log) for stall forensics
  • Workday awareness ("you're outside office hours, suggest deferring")
  • Multi-timezone display for distributed teams
  • Deadline countdown injection from a ~/.claude/deadlines.yaml

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