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Temporal awareness

Out of the box, most models don’t know what day it is. Temporal awareness fixes that by prepending a one-line date, weekday and timezone note to every system prompt - only when the prompt doesn’t already pull those values in itself.

Enabling

Temporal awareness is on by default, and setup’s Pick your defaults step offers it too. Switch it with Settings → Features → Temporal awareness. The change applies to every chat, new or existing, from its next message. Below the switch, an expandable “Template variables” cheat sheet lists the five {{CURRENT_*}} placeholders with an example value for each. The Snippets page’s Variables panel lists them too, under Built in - filled in automatically, each with its value right now.

How it decides to fire

Before each message, Loach checks your instructions - global, Space or per-chat - for the {{CURRENT_*}} placeholders. Memories and sources are left alone: a placeholder inside one of them is sent as plain text and doesn’t count. The placeholders are:

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

If any of them is present, you’ve asked for the values inline: Loach fills them in and adds nothing else, so you’re in control of where and how they appear. If none is present, Loach puts a single line at the front of the prompt (after the persona, if one is set):

Current date: 2026-10-01 (Thursday, Europe/Warsaw).

The values come from your computer’s clock and timezone. Placeholders are filled in whether or not temporal awareness is on - the switch only controls the automatic line. Private Chat gets neither.

Why the time isn’t included

The automatic line carries the date, weekday and timezone, but not the time of day. It sits at the very start of the system prompt, and Ollama reuses the start of a prompt it has already processed to answer follow-ups faster. A clock that changed every minute would break that on almost every message and force the whole conversation to be re-read. If a chat needs the exact time, put {{CURRENT_TIME}} or {{CURRENT_DATETIME}} in its instructions (accepting that cost), or turn on the Date & time tool in Settings → Tools so the model can ask for it when it needs it - see Built-in tools.

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.