← All features

Temporal awareness

Out of the box, most models do not know what day it is. Temporal awareness fixes that by prepending a short “current date / time / timezone” preamble to every system prompt — only when the prompt does not already pull those values in itself.

Enabling

Toggle Settings → Features → Temporal awareness. New chats will start including the preamble immediately. Existing chats inherit the new setting on their next message. The Features tab also includes an expandable “Template variables” cheat sheet listing every {{CURRENT_*}} placeholder with an example value.

How it decides to fire

Loach scans your effective system prompt (after the global → Space → per-chat cascade) for any of the {{CURRENT_*}} placeholders:

• {{CURRENT_DATE}}, {{CURRENT_TIME}}, {{CURRENT_WEEKDAY}}, {{CURRENT_DATETIME}}, {{CURRENT_TIMEZONE}}

If any of them are present, you have asked for the values inline and Loach does not prepend anything — you are in control of where and how they appear. If none are present, Loach prepends a short preamble of the form “Current date: … Current time: … Timezone: …”.

Why it matters

Many factual queries depend on “today”: meeting scheduling, deadlines, age calculations, news cut-offs. Without temporal awareness the model relies on whatever date it was trained around, which is almost certainly wrong by the time you are talking to it.