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Get past time from the Time MCP server #2710
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As part of my work, I need a way to get past time.
For example, one of my customers might ask something like "Which requests were sent in the last 5 hours?"
I need to first fetch the time from 5 hours ago, and then call the tool that can fetch those requests based on a start time and end time.
Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to have a tool called get_time_ago with the following fields:
- days_ago: int of how many days ago the time should be
- hours_ago: int of how many hours ago the time should be
- minutes_ago: int of how many minutes ago the time should be
- seconds_ago: int of how many second ago the time should be
- milliseconds_ago: int of how many milliseconds ago the time should
So for example, if I ask the LLM "Give me all the requests from two and a half hours ago", it will call get_time_ago(hours_ago=2, minutes_ago=30)
Describe alternatives you've considered
One possible alternative is that the LLM will call the get_current_time tool and deduce the past time on its own. Meaning, that this capability will be handled in the LLM side instead of the MCP side.
From my experience, LLMs have hard time to calculate time on their own, so if I run the "get_current_time" tool, the LLM might not be able to deduce the new time from the returned string. Having a dedicated tool for that will probably make our lives easier that way.
Additional context
If I will get an OK from the maintainers, I would gladly implement this!
In the implementation, I would probably use the datetime.timedelta class to handle the time differences.
Activity
saroad2 commentedon Sep 24, 2025
Hi @olaservo,
I hope you're doing well! I opened this issue two weeks ago and wanted to kindly follow up.
I’d love to hear your thoughts before moving forward with the implementation just to make sure it aligns with the project’s direction and avoids unnecessary work for everyone. I’m happy to make adjustments based on your feedback and contribute the implementation if it’s something your team finds valuable.
Thanks so much for your time and consideration!
olaservo commentedon Oct 29, 2025
Hi @saroad2 sorry that I missed your tag here! I think this feature could be useful but right now we're focusing more on things like resolving bugs and enhancements that demonstrate MCP protocol features. Lets keep this open for the future. Thanks for the suggestion!
cliffhall commentedon Oct 19, 2026
Triage: Priority Low (total 2)
Board: Servers V2 (#43), Status
Incoming, awaiting maintainer review (no milestone yet). Part of the backlog triage in #4875.cliffhall commentedon Oct 29, 2026
Shipped in #5369 on
v2/main, proven alongside the other #5275 work in rollup #5400.feat(time): add get_time_ago for past times