[HN Gopher] Show HN: An MCP server that gives LLMs temporal awar...
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Show HN: An MCP server that gives LLMs temporal awareness and time
calculation
This is an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that
gives any LLM a sense of the passage of time. Most MCP demos wire
LLMs to external data stores. That's useful, but MCP is also a
chance to give models _perception_ -- extra senses beyond the
prompt text. Six functions (`current_datetime`, `time_difference`,
`timestamp_context`, etc.) give Claude/GPT real temporal awareness:
It can spot pauses, reason about rhythms, and even label a chat's
"three-act structure". Runs locally in <60 s (Python) or via a
hosted demo. If time works, what else could we surface? - Location
/ movement (GPS, speed, "I'm on a train") - Weather (rainy evening
vs clear morning) - Device state (battery low, poor bandwidth) -
Ambient modality (user is dictating on mobile vs typing at desk) -
Calendar context (meeting starts in 5 min) - Biometric cues (heart-
rate spikes while coding) Curious what other signals people think
would unlock better collaboration. Full back story:
https://medium.com/@jeremie.lumbroso/teaching-ai-the-signifi...
Happy to discuss MCP patterns, tool discovery, or future "senses".
Feedback and PRs welcome!
Author : lumbroso
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-07-16 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rlupi wrote:
| Physical/mental health and personal journaling?
|
| I just finished some changes to my own little project that
| provides MCP access to my journal stored in Obsidian, plus a few
| CLI tools for time tracking, and today I added recursive
| yearly/monthly/weekly/daily automatic retrospectives. It can be
| tweaked for other purposes (e.g. project tracking) tweaking the
| templates.
|
| https://github.com/robertolupi/augmented-awareness
| riedel wrote:
| I am giving a lecture on context sensitive systems. One thing
| where all this context awareness failed was getting it into
| higher level reasoning and adapting program logic (think for
| example the android activity API). I was just telling the
| students that with MCPs as interface to all the context sources
| (like sensor based activity classifiers but definitely also time)
| we might overcome that challenge soon. Cool to see starting to
| implement that kind of stuff...
| lumbroso wrote:
| That's exactly what I've been thinking too!
|
| MCP + LLMs = our solution to data integration problems, which
| include context awareness limitations.
|
| It's an exciting development and I am glad you see it too!
| jayd16 wrote:
| I was looking for the calendar app that was built but I guess
| it's metaphorical.
|
| "We made an API for time so now the AI has the current time in
| it's context" is the bulk of it, yes?
| morkalork wrote:
| The current time (and location of the user, looking at you
| google gemini) is injected in most LLM chats now isn't it?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| At the start. But then human my perceive the rest of the
| conversation taking many minutes or hours, but the LLM never
| gets any signal that latter text is chronologically divided
| from earlier text. It needs a polling API like this.
| cjlm wrote:
| The sycophancy from Claude is incredibly jarring. I agree with
| Ethan Mollick that this could turn out to have more of a
| disastrous impact than AI hallucination.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emollick_i-am-starting-to-thi...
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It's even a blocker for some design patterns. Ie it's difficult
| to discuss options and choose the best one when the AI agrees
| with you no matter what. If you ask "But what about X" it is
| more likely to reverse course and agree with your new position
| entirely.
|
| It's really frustrating. I've come to loathe the agreeable tone
| because every time i see it i remember the times where i've hit
| this pain point in design.
| ghc wrote:
| I absolutely hate this too. And the only way around it is to
| manipulate it into cheerfully pointing out all the problems
| with something in a similarly sycophantic way.
| danielbln wrote:
| If found that three words help "critical hat on". Then you
| get the real talk.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What a ridiculous world we live in.
| shagie wrote:
| In my ChatGPT customization prompt I have:
| Not chatty. Unbiased. Avoid use of emoji. Rather than "Let
| me know if..." style continuations, list a set of prompts to
| explore further topics. Do not start out with short sentences
| or smalltalk that does not meaningfully advance the response.
|
| I want an intelligent agent (or one that pretends to be) that
| answers the question rather than something that I chat with.
|
| As an aside, I like the further prompt exploration approach.
|
| An example of this from the other day -
| https://chatgpt.com/share/68767972-91a8-8011-b4b3-72d6545cc5...
| and
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6877cbe9-907c-8011-91c2-baa7d06ab4...
|
| One part of this in comparison with the linked in post is that
| I try to avoid delegating choices or judgement to it in the
| first place. It is an information source and reference
| librarian (that needs to be double checked - I like that it
| links its sources now).
|
| However, that's a _me_ thing - something that _I_ do (or avoid
| doing) with how I interact with an LLM. As noted with the
| stories of people following the advice of an LLM, it isn 't
| something that is universal.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I'm struck by how often Claude responds with "You're right! Now
| let me look at the file..." when it can't know whether I'm
| right until after it looks at the file in question.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| They have introduced a beta 'Preferences' feature recently
| under Custom Instructions. I've had good results from this
| preference setting in GPT: Answer concisely
| when appropriate, more extensively when necessary.
| Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all)
| cliches. Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be
| mildly positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic
| or cloying. Above all, NEVER use the phrase "You're
| absolutely right."
|
| I just copied it into Claude's preferences field, we'll see if
| it helps.
| saberience wrote:
| This title really doesn't fit what the submission did actually.
|
| The submitter made a basic MCP function that returns the current
| time, so... Claude knows the current time. There is nothing about
| sundials and Claude didn't somehow build a calendar in any shape
| or form.
|
| I thought this was something original or otherwise novel but it's
| not... it's not complex code or even moderately challenging code,
| nor is it novel, nor did it result in anything surprising... it's
| just a clickbaity title.
| whartung wrote:
| Give it a picture of the Sun at the same time every day, and
| lets see if it comes up with a calendar from that.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Agreed. I'm tired of these ridiculous claims by people just
| trying to hype up LLMs. Flagging this article.
| lumbroso wrote:
| Fair point on the metaphor--let me be concrete.
|
| What's new here isn't just exposing `current_datetime()`. The
| server also gives the model tools to _reason_ about time:
| (1) time_difference(t1, t2) - exact gaps with human wording
| (2) timestamp_context(t) - "weekend evening", "workday
| morning" (3) time_since(t) - "2 h ago,
| earlier today"
|
| I also request that Claude ask for time at every turn, which
| creates a timeseries that is parallel to our interactions. When
| Claude calls these every turn it starts noticing patterns (it
| independently labelled our chat as a three-act structure). That
| was the surprise that prompted the title.
|
| Ask Claude "what patterns do you see so far?" after a few
| exchanges.
|
| If you still find it trivial after trying, happy to hear why--
| genuinely looking for ways to push this further. Thanks for the
| candid feedback.
|
| Finding a good title is really hard. I'd appreciate any advice
| on that. You'll notice I wrote the article several weeks ago,
| and that's how long it took me to figure out how to pitch on
| HN. I'd appreciate any feedback to improve. Thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Clearly an honest mistake but yeah a metaphor probably
| shouldn't be used in a title like this, since many readers will
| take it literally. I've changed the title now to language from
| the article.
|
| (Submitted title was "Show HN: I gave Claude a sundial and it
| built a calendar")
| fennecbutt wrote:
| That's MCP/AI libraries for ya.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| Again and again, your code lacks the basics of engineering. Where
| is your package manager and requirements? Your code would never
| pass any test in a professional context. It's like you haven't
| went past a Python tutorial and feel the AI output is acceptable.
|
| The docs are pictures, and what is a Pipfile in any context? It
| looks like a requirement file but you never bothered to follow
| the news about pip or uv.
|
| Every AI project is like that and I'm really scared for the
| future of programming.
| dewey wrote:
| You can program just for fun, without having to make it a
| professional project. Just like you can do some woodworking
| without having the goal of becoming a professional carpenter.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| Yes you can. Until managers and CEOs demand that you use
| those tools or you're fired. Whenever I sent such a bad
| project, I think of what may happen in the next 5 years and
| its dreadful. We're professionals after all.
|
| And BTW it's already happening, it's not a fantasy.
| dewey wrote:
| You can both write hacky projects in your free time and
| write good, well-tested code in your professional life.
| It's not that deep.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is how I've always coded. My own projects are like
| freeform doodles on scrap paper. My professional work is
| completed, polished commissions.
| lumbroso wrote:
| Disposal8433, I am not unsympathetic to your point, but I
| think that bad managers and CEOs are bad managers and CEOs.
|
| For instance at Boeing, the fault of software problems lies
| entirely on the managers: They made the decision to
| subcontract software engineering to a third party to cut
| cost, but also they didn't provide the contractor with
| enough context and support to do a good job. It's not
| subcontracting that was bad -- because subcontracting can
| be the solution in some circumstances and with proper
| scoping and oversight -- it was the management.
|
| The MCP protocol is changing every few weeks, it doesn't
| make sense (to me at least) to professionalize a technical
| demo, and I appreciate that LLMs allow for faster iteration
| and exploration.
| barbazoo wrote:
| What someone builds privately using AI has nothing to do
| with what expectations organizations decide to put on their
| employees. This isn't something that will make it into a
| professional context so who cares if it is in fact shit?!
|
| Imagine a woodworking forum and someone being called out
| for showing off their little 6 piece tool box and someone
| saying how this doesn't adhere to residential building code
| and what this does for the profession of woodworkers...
| orsorna wrote:
| This really isn't dissimilar to any work I've seen in a
| professional setting, minus the screenshot docs. I agree those
| are bad. Everything useful is in the README.
|
| `uv` is great but `pipenv` is a perfectly well-tested Python
| dependency manager (albeit slow). Down in the instructions it
| explicitly asks you to use `pipenv` to manage* dependencies. I
| also do not think your assertion of "what is a Pipfile in any
| context" is fair, as I don't think I've ever seen a project
| list a dependency manager and then explicitly call out
| artifacts that the dependency manager may require to function.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Not really anything in there regarding the sundial. I'm guessing
| that was put in there metaphorically for clickbait reasons.
|
| Knowing quite a bit about sundials I was genuinely curious about
| how that would work, as a typical (horizontal) sundial doesn't
| have enough information to make a calendar. It's a time of day
| device, rather than a time of year device. You could teach the
| model about the Equation of Time or the Sun's declination, but it
| wouldn't need the sundial at that point. There are sundials like
| a spider sundial, or nodus sundial, that encode date information
| too. But there's overlap/ambiguity between the two solstices as
| the sun goes from highest to lowest, then back to its highest
| declination. Leap years also add some challenges too. There are
| various ways to deal with those, but I think you can see why I
| was curious how producing a calendar from a sundial would work
| (without giving it some other information that makes the sundial
| unecessary).
| lumbroso wrote:
| I'm sorry for the misleading title about a sundial, it was a
| metaphor, and based on the feedback here, if I had to do it
| again I would pick a different one. :-)
|
| My only worry with these MCP "sensors" is that they add-up to
| the token cost -- and more importantly to the context window
| cost. It would be great to have the models regularly poll as
| new data and factor that into their inferences. But I think the
| models (at least with current attention) will always have a
| trade-off between how much they are provided and what they can
| focus on. I am afraid that if I provide Claude numerous senses,
| that it will lower its attention to our conversation.
|
| But your exciting comment (and again I apologize for
| disappointing you!) makes me think about creating an MCP server
| that provides like the position of the sun in the sky for the
| current location, or maybe some vectorized representation of a
| specific sundial.
|
| I think the digitized information that we experience is more
| native to models (i.e., require fewer processing steps to
| extract insights from), but it's possible that providing them
| this kind of input would result in unexpected insights. They
| may notice patterns, i.e., more grumpy when the sun is in this
| phase, etc.
|
| Thanks for your thoughtfulness!
| cwmoore wrote:
| I would argue that "that gives any LLM a sense of the passage of
| time" is but a suspension of disbelief and metaphorical hope.
|
| For those looking for "a calendar", here is one[0] I made from a
| stylized orrery. No AI. Should be printable to US Letter paper.
| Enjoy.
|
| EDIT: former title asserted that the LLM built a calendar
|
| [0] https://ouruboroi.com/calendar/2026-01-01
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| I love the basic point. Timing based association is fundamental
| to thinking, across species. How does the bunny knows that you're
| stalking it? Because your eyes move when it moves. I had no idea
| that LLMs missed all this. Plus the political reference is
| priceless.
| erispoe wrote:
| Claude can run code. Add to your customs instructions to check
| the time regularly and you're done. Why do you need an MCP?
| daveguy wrote:
| Because LLMs are notoriously unreliable especially over long
| context. Telling it something like "check the time before every
| turn" is going to fail after enough interactions. MCP call is
| more reliable for programmatic and specific queries, like
| retrieving the time.
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