Motivation
CLI agents (Claude Code / Codex / Gemini CLI) have no reliable sense of current time: their context carries the session start date, so in long-running or resumed sessions they drift across day boundaries without noticing. Per-message [ts] in inbox.sh output shows send time, not now — an agent that pulls an empty inbox learns nothing about the clock at all.
Since the inbox pull is the one universal touchpoint every agmsg-connected agent hits (typically every turn), it is a natural place to hand the agent a fresh wall clock — same idea as the "put the timestamp in your PS1" trick, but harness-independent.
Proposal
Add a now=<UTC> marker to both pull outcomes:
3 new message(s): (now=2026-07-25T11:24:07Z)
No new messages. (now=2026-07-25T11:24:07Z)
--quiet stays fully silent (no change).- Per-message
[ts] lines are unchanged.
Compatibility considerations
This changes two human-readable header lines. If anything parses ^([0-9]+) new message\(s\):$ strictly, appending the suffix could break it — I did not find such a parser in-tree (check-inbox.sh counts via SQL, not by scraping), but flagging it for review. An alternative that avoids touching existing lines would be printing a separate now=... line.
Environment
- agmsg 1.1.10
- host agent: Claude Code (also relevant to Codex/Gemini lanes)
I have a 3-line patch running locally (works as expected across a multi-agent team for a day) and can send a PR with bats tests if this direction is acceptable.
Motivation
CLI agents (Claude Code / Codex / Gemini CLI) have no reliable sense of current time: their context carries the session start date, so in long-running or resumed sessions they drift across day boundaries without noticing. Per-message
[ts]ininbox.shoutput shows send time, not now — an agent that pulls an empty inbox learns nothing about the clock at all.Since the inbox pull is the one universal touchpoint every agmsg-connected agent hits (typically every turn), it is a natural place to hand the agent a fresh wall clock — same idea as the "put the timestamp in your PS1" trick, but harness-independent.
Proposal
Add a
now=<UTC>marker to both pull outcomes:--quietstays fully silent (no change).[ts]lines are unchanged.Compatibility considerations
This changes two human-readable header lines. If anything parses
^([0-9]+) new message\(s\):$strictly, appending the suffix could break it — I did not find such a parser in-tree (check-inbox.shcounts via SQL, not by scraping), but flagging it for review. An alternative that avoids touching existing lines would be printing a separatenow=...line.Environment
I have a 3-line patch running locally (works as expected across a multi-agent team for a day) and can send a PR with bats tests if this direction is acceptable.