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Automatic Date/Time Injection for All Agents

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​

Added automatic current date/time injection to all agents that use BaseLangGraphAgent. This eliminates the need for agents to call external tools to determine the current date, improving response latency and simplifying date-based queries.

What Changed​

1. BaseLangGraphAgent Enhancement​

File: utils/a2a_common/base_langgraph_agent.py

Added _get_system_instruction_with_date() method that automatically prepends current date/time to system instructions.

Date context includes:

  • Human-readable date: "Sunday, October 26, 2025"
  • Current time in UTC
  • ISO 8601 format
  • Instructions to use this as reference point for date calculations
def _get_system_instruction_with_date(self) -> str:
    """Return the system instruction with current date/time injected."""
    now_utc = datetime.now(ZoneInfo("UTC"))

    date_context = f"""## Current Date and Time

Today's date: {now_utc.strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y")}
Current time: {now_utc.strftime("%H:%M:%S UTC")}
ISO format: {now_utc.isoformat()}

Use this as the reference point for all date calculations...
"""
    return date_context + self.get_system_instruction()

2. Prompt Templates Update​

File: utils/prompt_templates.py

  • Added DATE_HANDLING_NOTES with guidelines for using the automatically provided date
  • Added include_date_handling parameter to scope_limited_agent_instruction() function
  • Updated notes to reference date from prompt instead of calling a tool

3. Agent Updates​

All time-sensitive agents were updated with include_date_handling=True:

  • PagerDuty: Calculate dates for incidents and on-call schedules
  • Jira: Convert relative dates to YYYY-MM-DD format for JQL queries
  • Splunk: Convert relative time to Splunk time syntax (earliest/latest)
  • ArgoCD: Filter applications and resources by date
  • Backstage: Filter catalog entities by creation/modification date
  • Confluence: Find recently updated or created pages
  • GitHub: Filter issues, PRs, and commits by date
  • Komodor: Calculate time ranges for events and issues
  • Slack: Search messages with time-based filters
  • Webex: Filter messages and rooms by timestamp

Benefits​

  1. No Extra Tool Calls: Agents have immediate access to current date without needing to call a tool
  2. Lower Latency: Eliminates round-trip time for date retrieval
  3. Universal Coverage: All agents automatically get date context
  4. Simpler Implementation: No need to add datetime tools to MCP servers
  5. Consistent Behavior: All agents use the same date reference point

Example Usage​

Before (Would have required adding a tool):​

User: "Show me incidents from today"
Agent: [Would need to call a get_current_datetime tool first]
Agent: [Would receive 2025-10-26]
Agent: [Would then call get_incidents with since=2025-10-26]

After (Automatic Injection):​

User: "Show me incidents from today"
Agent: [Uses date/time auto-injected in system prompt: October 26, 2025]
Agent: [Directly calls get_incidents with since=2025-10-26]

How to Enable for Time-Sensitive Agents​

For agents that frequently handle date-based queries:

SYSTEM_INSTRUCTION = scope_limited_agent_instruction(
    service_name="MyService",
    service_operations="manage time-sensitive operations",
    include_date_handling=True  # <-- Add this
)

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")
)

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"

Testing​

The date is generated when the agent graph is created (during MCP setup). To test with specific dates:

from unittest.mock import patch
from datetime import datetime
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo

@patch('ai_platform_engineering.utils.a2a_common.base_langgraph_agent.datetime')
def test_agent_date_handling(mock_datetime):
    mock_datetime.now.return_value = datetime(2025, 10, 26, 15, 30, 45, tzinfo=ZoneInfo("UTC"))
    # Test agent behavior

Future Enhancements​

Potential improvements:

  • User timezone detection from request headers
  • Multi-timezone display
  • Date range validation
  • Enhanced natural language date parsing

Files Modified​

  • ai_platform_engineering/utils/a2a_common/base_langgraph_agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/utils/prompt_templates.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/pagerduty/agent_pagerduty/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/jira/agent_jira/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/splunk/agent_splunk/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/argocd/agent_argocd/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/backstage/agent_backstage/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/confluence/agent_confluence/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/github/agent_github/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/komodor/agent_komodor/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/slack/agent_slack/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py
  • ai_platform_engineering/agents/webex/agent_webex/protocol_bindings/a2a_server/agent.py

Migration Notes​

No migration needed! This feature is:

  • ✅ Backward compatible
  • ✅ Automatically enabled for all agents
  • ✅ Non-breaking change
  • ✅ Optional enhanced guidelines via include_date_handling=True

Existing agents will automatically benefit from this feature without any code changes.