AI coding agents don’t show when things happened. You scroll back through a long session and can’t tell if that tool call was 2 minutes ago or 20. The agent itself has no concept of elapsed time — it can’t notice it’s been stuck for 15 minutes.

This is the most requested feature on Claude Code — 10+ duplicate issues, none implemented. Here’s a 40-line OMP extension that does it.

What it does

How it works

Three OMP extension hooks:

1. Input transform — deterministic, modifies user text before it reaches the LLM:

pi.on("input", (event) => {
  return { action: "transform", text: `[${ts()}] ${event.text}` };
});

2. System prompt injection — tells the agent the current time:

pi.on("before_agent_start", (event) => {
  return {
    systemPrompt: event.systemPrompt +
      `\n\nCurrent time: ${new Date().toLocaleTimeString()}. ` +
      `Always prepend [HH:MM:SS] timestamp to your responses.`
  };
});

This fires before each agent loop. OMP rebuilds the system prompt fresh each time — no accumulation.

3. Status bar — elapsed time per turn:

pi.on("turn_start", (_event, ctx) => {
  turnStartMs = Date.now();
  ctx.ui.setStatus("timestamp", `[${ts()}]`);
});

pi.on("turn_end", (_event, ctx) => {
  const elapsed = Math.round((Date.now() - turnStartMs) / 1000);
  ctx.ui.setStatus("timestamp", `[${ts()}] ${elapsed}s`);
});

What didn’t work

pi.sendMessage() from event handlers. The plan was to inject a timestamp entry after each turn — deterministic, no instruction following. But sendMessage and appendEntry silently fail from event handlers. Known OMP issue. The input event transform is the only reliable injection mechanism.

/reload for extension development. OMP caches compiled TypeScript modules. Code changes require a full process restart, not just /reload.

Setup

# Add to ~/.omp/agent/config.yml
extensions:
  - ~/tools/chat-timestamps

The full extension is ~40 lines of TypeScript.

The agent having time awareness changes its behavior. It can notice “this segment took 39 seconds” vs “this took 8 minutes.” It correlates effort with progress. That’s the reasoning primitive issue #32566 was asking for.