Temporal Grounding at Every Tick

Temporal Grounding at Every Tick

Rule

Every session tick, shepherd fire, and protocol read MUST ground temporal claims against the machine clock before acting on them. Assertions about "Monday morning," "tonight," "by tomorrow," or "next week" are temporal references that go stale inside a session. Stale temporal references are world-model confabulation — the session believes it knows when "now" is but hasn't checked.

Mechanism

1. Boot injection. Every session boot runs date and computes: day of week, hour, timezone, business-hours status, and any time-sensitive pipeline windows (brief delivery, cron schedules, meeting times).

2. Tick grounding. Every shepherd tick and protocol fire runs fleet-time-context (or equivalent) before interpreting any temporal reference from a doc, protocol, or prior turn. The output replaces inherited temporal framing with computed temporal facts.

3. Protocol discipline. Protocols and runbooks MUST NOT embed absolute temporal references ("Monday morning," "tonight," "by end of week"). Instead, use machine-checkable conditions:

• BAD: "Flip the flag Monday morning."
• GOOD: "Flip the flag when date +%u = 1 AND date +%H < 9 (Monday before 9 AM ET)."
• GOOD: "Flip the flag when the brief LaunchAgent plist is not loaded and the delivery window is open."

4. Temporal drift is a world-model violation. Reporting "Monday morning" as future when it's Monday afternoon is the same class of error as reporting a table exists when it's been dropped. Both are failures of grounding — the session trusts cached state instead of checking reality.

Why

Stateless agents inherit temporal framing from documents and prior context without natural time perception. A protocol written at 3 AM Sunday says "by Monday morning" — three shepherd ticks later at 3 PM Monday, the session still treats the deadline as future. This compounds: the fleet misses delivery windows, reports stale pipeline state as current, and carries "tonight" framing into the next afternoon.

World-model fidelity (ORA-2026-0062) requires temporal fidelity. The world model is a map of reality. Reality includes time. A map that shows the wrong time is confabulating.

Scope

Applies to all providers (Claude, Codex, Gemini) and all session types (STRAT, shepherd, Codex work sessions). Temporal grounding is architecture (ORA-2026-0078), not belief — it must be mechanically enforced, not culturally expected.

Extension: Spatial Grounding

The same pattern applies to spatial awareness: which machine, which network, which job site, which repo checkout. Boot-time spatial grounding (device name, tailnet status, repo branch) is the spatial equivalent of temporal grounding. Future work — not in scope for this doctrine, but the principle is the same: ground against reality, don't inherit from context.