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Agents with Enhanced Date Handling

Status: 🟢 In-use (Part of consolidated date handling feature) Category: Features & Enhancements Date: October 27, 2025 (Consolidated into 2025-11-05-date-handling.md)

Overview​

All agents automatically receive current date/time in their system prompts via BaseLangGraphAgent._get_system_instruction_with_date().

This document lists agents that have enhanced date handling guidelines enabled (include_date_handling=True or DATE_HANDLING_NOTES).

Agents with Enhanced Date Handling​

1. PagerDuty​

  • File: agents/pagerduty/agent_pagerduty/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Incident management, on-call schedules - heavily date-dependent
  • Guidelines: Calculate date ranges for incidents and on-call queries

2. Jira​

  • File: agents/jira/agent_jira/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Issue tracking with created/updated/resolved dates
  • Guidelines: Convert relative dates to YYYY-MM-DD format for JQL queries

3. Splunk​

  • File: agents/splunk/agent_splunk/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Log searches always require time ranges
  • Guidelines: Convert relative time to Splunk time syntax (earliest/latest parameters)

4. ArgoCD​

  • File: agents/argocd/agent_argocd/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Application deployments and sync status queries by date
  • Guidelines: Use current date for filtering applications and resources

5. Backstage​

  • File: agents/backstage/agent_backstage/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Catalog entity searches and filtering
  • Guidelines: Filter catalog entities by creation/modification date

6. Confluence​

  • File: agents/confluence/agent_confluence/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Document searches by creation/modification date
  • Guidelines: Find recently updated or created pages

7. GitHub​

  • File: agents/github/agent_github/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Issues, PRs, and commits often filtered by date
  • Guidelines: Filter GitHub resources using current date as reference

8. Komodor​

  • File: agents/komodor/agent_komodor/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Kubernetes events, audit logs, and issues with time ranges
  • Guidelines: Calculate time ranges for "today's issues" or "last hour's events"

9. Slack​

  • File: agents/slack/agent_slack/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Message history searches by time
  • Guidelines: Search messages with time-based filters

10. Webex​

  • File: agents/webex/agent_webex/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • Why: Message and room searches by time
  • Guidelines: Filter messages and rooms by timestamp

How It Works​

Automatic Date Injection (ALL Agents)​

Every agent sees this at the start of their system prompt:

## Current Date and Time

Today's date: Sunday, October 26, 2025
Current time: 15:30:45 UTC
ISO format: 2025-10-26T15:30:45+00:00

Use this as the reference point for all date calculations...

Enhanced Guidelines (Enabled Agents)​

When include_date_handling=True is set, agents also receive:

## Important Notes

- The current date and time are provided at the top of these instructions
- Use the provided current date as the reference point for all date calculations
- For queries involving 'today', 'tomorrow', 'yesterday', or other relative dates, calculate from the provided current date
- Convert relative dates to absolute dates (YYYY-MM-DD format) before calling API tools

Plus service-specific guidelines in additional_guidelines.

Coverage Summary​

  • Total Agents: 10+ (all BaseLangGraphAgent-based)
  • With Enhanced Date Handling: 10
  • Coverage: 100% of time-sensitive agents

Benefits​

  1. No Tool Calls: Agents don't need to call external date tools
  2. Zero Latency: Date available immediately in prompt
  3. Consistent Behavior: All agents calculate from same reference point
  4. Better UX: Users can use natural language like "today", "last week"
  5. Accurate Results: Agents convert relative dates correctly

Example Queries​

PagerDuty​

  • "Show me incidents from today"
  • "Who is on-call tomorrow?"
  • "List all incidents from last week"

Jira​

  • "Show issues created this week"
  • "Find bugs resolved yesterday"
  • "Issues updated in the last 7 days"

Splunk​

  • "Search logs from the last hour"
  • "Show errors from today"
  • "Find warnings from last 24 hours"

GitHub​

  • "Show PRs merged today"
  • "Find issues created this month"
  • "Recent commits from this week"

Adding to New Agents​

To enable enhanced date handling for a new agent:

SYSTEM_INSTRUCTION = scope_limited_agent_instruction(
    service_name="MyService",
    service_operations="manage time-sensitive operations",
    additional_guidelines=[
        "Your service-specific guidelines here",
        "When filtering by date, use current date provided above"
    ],
    include_error_handling=True,
    include_date_handling=True  # <-- Add this line
)

Or for agents using build_system_instruction:

from ai_platform_engineering.utils.prompt_templates import DATE_HANDLING_NOTES

SYSTEM_INSTRUCTION = build_system_instruction(
    agent_name="MY AGENT",
    agent_purpose="...",
    response_guidelines=[...],
    important_notes=DATE_HANDLING_NOTES,  # <-- Add this
    graceful_error_handling=graceful_error_handling_template("MyService")
)