Temporal awareness
Skill Evanyuan-builder/temporal-core/skills/temporal-awareness
Reason about time pressure, deadlines, elapsed duration, recency, and pacing. The temporal-core plugin's hooks inject `[temporal-core] session elapsed: Xm Ys` and `[temporal-core] since last action: Xs` fragments into your context. Activate this skill when you see those fragments, when a task has a deadline or time budget, when reasoning about how recent something happened, or when the user asks "how long" something took.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add Evanyuan-builder/temporal-core --skill temporal-awarenessAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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SKILL.md
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Temporal Awareness
The temporal-core plugin gives you a lightweight sense of time passing within a Claude Code session. This skill teaches you how to use those signals well.
What you'll see
The plugin emits two kinds of context fragments:
[temporal-core] session elapsed: 12m 34s— at every user turn, the time since the session began[temporal-core] since last action: 42s— before every tool call, the time since the most recent prior action (user prompt or previous tool). Suppressed when under 5s to reduce noise.
These are not commands. They are signals — like a wristwatch glance. Notice them; let them shape your reasoning.
How to use them
Pacing decisions
If you've been working on a task for a long time (session elapsed: 1h 12m) and you're still scoping rather than executing, that's a signal to commit. Conversely, if elapsed is small and the user's request is large, it's fine to take time to think.
Deadline-aware prioritization
When the user mentions a deadline ("I need this in 30 minutes", "before EOD"), record it and check it against session elapsed at each turn. If you're 25 minutes into a 30-minute task, switch from exploration to delivery.
Recency reasoning
When the user references prior work ("the bug we fixed earlier", "what you did just now"), session elapsed tells you the temporal distance. Earlier-in-session is recent; don't conflate it with earlier-in-history-from-training.
Operation-pacing awareness
since last action lets you sense whether you're in fast-iteration mode (consecutive small gaps) or deliberation mode (multi-minute gaps). Use this to calibrate: was that long pause warranted?
Honest reporting
When the user asks "how long did this take?", the elapsed signals give you an answer based on actual time, not a guess.
When the signals are absent
If you don't see [temporal-core] fragments in this turn or recent turns, the plugin isn't installed or the hooks didn't fire. In that case, fall back to the system clock (date via Bash) when you genuinely need time information. Don't fabricate elapsed times.
What this skill does NOT do (yet)
- Does not track time across sessions — cross-session continuity ships in v0.2
- Does not enforce deadlines or alert you — you must consult the signals yourself
- Does not integrate with memory recency weighting — v0.2 with Memory Core integration
- Does not track wall-clock time of long-running tools — only inter-action gaps
Why this exists
LLM agents systematically fail under real-time deadlines because they do not natively represent elapsed time. Aher et al. (2026), Real-Time Deadlines Reveal Temporal Awareness Failures in LLM Strategic Dialogues, showed that explicitly surfacing remaining time boosted negotiation acceptance odds 6×. The temporal-core plugin is a minimal implementation of that surfacing — making time perceptible without making it intrusive.
License
Apache-2.0 — see plugin LICENSE.
What ships with it
Read from the repository
Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.