Time Awareness for AI Agents
Autonomous agents need more than a date stamp. They need triggers that fire reliably, event ordering they can trust, and a tools manifest their model can consume directly. temporalBLOCK provides all three.
Give your agent the tools manifest
GET /v1/tools returns an OpenAI or Anthropic function-calling manifest of every API operation your key is entitled to call. Pass it to your model at startup and the agent discovers, selects, and invokes the right temporalBLOCK endpoints on its own — no custom dispatcher required.
// Let your agent discover and call temporalBLOCK tools autonomously.
// Fetch the manifest at agent startup, pass it to the model.
const { tools, baseUrl } = await fetch(
"https://api.temporalblock.com/api/v1/tools?format=anthropic",
{ headers: { "X-API-Key": process.env.TBLK_API_KEY } }
).then((r) => r.json());
// Pass to your model — it will call the right endpoints itself.
const response = await anthropic.messages.create({
model: "claude-opus-4-5",
max_tokens: 1024,
tools,
messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Remind me every Friday at 9 AM." }],
});The manifest also works as an MCP tool list — fetch from GET /v1/mcp to get the MCP-native schema. Any MCP-compatible host can pick it up without extra wiring.
Temporal triggers — server-side, always-on
Temporal Skills let an agent create its own timers, alarms, and recurring schedules by POSTing a trigger predicate to /v1/skills. The server evaluates the trigger — the agent's process doesn't need to stay alive. Fires are delivered as signed webhooks with a consistent retry backoff.
// Create a recurring timer that fires a webhook.
// The trigger is a Spiral-coordinate predicate — no raw UTC cron strings.
const { skill, webhookSecret } = await fetch(
"https://api.temporalblock.com/api/v1/skills",
{
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"X-API-Key": process.env.TBLK_API_KEY,
},
body: JSON.stringify({
name: "weekly-friday-standup",
trigger: {
kind: "recur",
rung: "wk",
phase: 4 / 7, // Friday
},
webhookUrl: "https://your-agent.example.com/fire",
}),
}
).then((r) => r.json());
// webhookSecret is shown once — verify X-Tblk-Signature on every delivery.
// Fires regardless of device state: screen off, app killed, or offline.at (one-shot moment), after (delay from now), recur (repeating schedule), displaceFrom (displacement threshold), whenStateMatches (state-KV condition), whenPaceBelow (output-rate alert), whenPhaseRecurs (detected recurring pattern), and whenSequenceRecurs (ordered motif detection).Strict event ordering with Causal Block
When multiple agent steps or distributed nodes write events, wall-clock timestamps collide within the same millisecond. Causal Block issues Hybrid Logical Clock tuples that always strictly increase — even on the same machine in the same millisecond — so your agent's event log has a total order you can replay deterministically.
- Scheduled-task agents — create a skill at plan time and receive a webhook when the trigger fires, regardless of whether the agent process is running.
- Long-horizon planners — anchor each reasoning step to a certified time so multi-step chains don't drift.
- Multi-agent systems — Causal Block gives every agent a globally ordered event stream, avoiding split-brain on concurrent writes.
- Pace-aware generation — Output Pacing tracks tokens/sec against a real clock so agents can surface accurate finish-time estimates to users.
Build time-aware agents today
Free Lite tier includes /v1/tools, /v1/calibrate, and server-side triggers. Upgrade for always-on Skills and Causal Block.