Your LLM doesn't know what day it is: date handling for AI tool calls

## Why LLMs don't know the current date Your favorite LLM doesn't have any way of knowing what time it is. It has no access to the current date, and it doesn't know what day of the week it is. It also doesn't know what year it is, or even what decade it is. It's one of those things that _sounds_ obvious once you've heard it - but you need to _tell_ your model the date and time in order for it to be able to make tool calls that are date-aware. Every major chat product - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - injects the current date into the model's context before your message ever reaches it. I ran into this while building an agent into our internal tools at [Craftwork](https://craftwork.com). **If you're the one integrating the model, injecting the date is your job.** If you skip it, you get some very strange behavior. ## Hallucinated date ranges fail silently Here's the scenario: at Craftwork, we have a variety of LLM tools for use internally - our sales and support teams will often ask our…