Skip to main content

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

Testing Strategy​

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