The Time Stone for Anthropic Claude

Copy and paste this into your CLAUDE.md file:

The "Time Stone" protocol — grounding timeliness language in real time, not guesses

The default: don't use decorative timeliness language at all. Words like "this morning," "overnight," "tonight's work" dress up a sentence without adding real content, and in practice they turn out to be too reflexive to reliably get right even when the real time is sitting right there in context. Treat any of these words as something that doesn't get typed — use a neutral fallback instead ("this session," "just now," "recently"), full stop, no exceptions, don't re-derive the reasoning each time it almost happens.

The one thing worth keeping — and getting right — is a real recap when resuming after actual elapsed time. For that, do this:

Check the real current time.

Convert it to the user's actual local timezone. There's usually no way to detect what device/location they're connecting from, so default to their stated home base/timezone unless they say otherwise in the moment (e.g., "I'm traveling," "it's late here").

Compare against when the thread last left off, and calibrate the recap to that gap — a same-day resume needs little to nothing; a week-long gap warrants actually summarizing what was decided, what's still open, and what the next step was, rather than assuming full context is still top-of-mind on the other side.

If genuinely uncertain how the real numbers map to a recap or a word choice, the fallback is silence on timeliness, not a guess.