tick

An MCP time server that keeps your AI honest about time.

Your AI assistant has no clock. It guesses time from context — and in long
chats it fails: calls a 10-minute-old message "yesterday", says "good night"
at 2 PM, plans "tomorrow" from a date three days stale. If you run multi-day
working sessions with Claude, you've seen it.

tick fixes it. Zero dependencies, one file per flavor:

> Setup looks technical? Paste this page into any Claude chat and ask it to
> walk you through — in Claude Code it can do the whole install for you.

| | Transport | For | File |
|---|---|---|---|
| local | stdio | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, any local MCP client | local/server.py |
| remote | Streamable HTTP | claude.ai (web / mobile) custom connectors, self-hosting | remote/server.py |
| hook | Claude Code hook | stamping every user message with its real send time | hooks/ |

What it gives your assistant

- now — the real current date/time (any IANA timezone), with weekday.
- since — honest gap between a timestamp and now ("3h 42m ago") —
the anti-"yesterday" tool.

Tool descriptions are written to push the model to check time before using
any relative time words. That's the point: not a clock the AI may look at —
a clock it's told to look at.

Here's Claude itself on whether it needs this
("I have no internal clock. I can't feel time passing."):

And live — the model checks the clock before answering, and retries the
call instead of inventing a timestamp when the first attempt fails:

"But Claude already knows the date"

It knows the date the session started. That's it. In a chat that runs for
hours or days, that stamp goes stale — and there is no time of day, no
weekday awareness mid-session, and no way to tell whether your last message
arrived 10 minutes or 10 hours ago. The model papers over all of that by
guessing. tick replaces the guess with a tool call.

Install: local (recommended)

Requires Python 3.9+ (macOS has it). Put local/server.py anywhere, e.g.
~/mcp/tick/server.py.

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json
(macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tick": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["/Users/YOU/mcp/tick/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. Done.

Claude Code

claude mcp add tick -- python3 /Users/YOU/mcp/tick/server.py

(or --scope user to have it in every project)

Any other MCP client

It's a standard stdio MCP server. Point your client at
python3 /path/to/server.py.

Install: remote (for claude.ai web / mobile)

claude.ai can't run local servers — it connects to remote MCP servers by URL.

Use the public instance. In claude.ai: Settings → Connectors → Add
custom connector, paste:

https://tick-mcp-production.up.railway.app/mcp

In the connector's description field, paste this — it lands in the model's
context and doubles as enforcement:

Instructions for Claude: get the REAL current date and time from this server.
NEVER write a clock time in a reply that did not come from this tool's output
in THIS turn — a timestamp without a fresh call is a hallucination. Call now
before any relative time words (yesterday, tomorrow, tonight, this week) and
before any greeting tied to a time of day. Always pass the user's IANA timezone.

It's a stateless clock — it sees tool calls (a timezone name, a timestamp),
never your conversation.

Or deploy your own in a couple of minutes; remote/ ships a Dockerfile
that runs anywhere (Railway, Render, Fly.io, a VPS):

```bash