[ivankorn]

Summary

This PR introduces an actionable, host-neutral Temporal Grounding skill under plugins/deliberation/skills/temporal-grounding/SKILL.md.

It serves as the direct host-side companion to the server-side date-grounding merged in #205, fulfilling the host retrieval guidance documented in AGENTS.md ("Time-sensitive questions").

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Background & Rationale

In PR #205, deliberation established server-side prompt date-grounding (core/grounding.js): every delegate prompt is stamped with today's UTC date and a no-denial rule ([unverified]).

As noted in #205 and TECHNICAL.md:

"The date is code, the lookup is the host's... The host is told to verify time-sensitive facts with its own retrieval and inline them with an as-of date and source."

While the server-side guardrail stops delegates from rejecting modern tools as "hallucinations", the host agent must still perform the actual fact-retrieval. On skill-driven hosts (such as OpenAI Codex CLI, Google Antigravity, and Cursor), agents rely on skill manifests to know when and how to execute workflows. Without a structured skill, host agents frequently overlook the passive note in AGENTS.md and delegate time-sensitive questions without prior verification.

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What This Skill Adds

plugins/deliberation/skills/temporal-grounding/SKILL.md provides host agents with clear, structured guidance:

1. Trigger Criteria:
   • Queries involving "latest", "current", or newly announced versions.
   • Evaluation of tool, library, API, or foundation model availability.
   • Pricing, quotas, deprecations, or cloud service roadmaps.
2. Host-Neutral Retrieval:
   • Outlines general retrieval categories (web search & documentation, domain-specific MCP tools like cloud/IaC providers, and CLI version inspection) without hardcoding proprietary tool names or vendor dependencies.
3. Delegation Inlining:
   • Instructs the host agent to synthesize verified facts, as-of dates, and sources directly into the prompt before invoking /ask-all or /consensus.
4. Zero Delegate Token Overhead:
   • Unlike persona prompts, this host skill is read only by the primary orchestrating agent and is never injected into downstream delegate calls.

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Verification

• Strictly wrapped to $\le 80$ characters per line.
• node scripts/sync-hosts.js --check: Clean, 0 drift (30 files up-to-date).
• npm run typecheck: 0 errors.

[antonbabenko]

Closing as superseded by #205. The decision there was no host skill: the date is stamped into every delegate prompt in code (core/grounding.js), and the "verify time-sensitive facts" guidance lives in AGENTS.md, the /ask-* commands and /consensus. The file here also sits in plugins/deliberation/skills/, which scripts/sync-hosts.js generates, so it cannot be hand-written. Thanks for the follow-through on the grounding work.