Claude echoes time-of-day greetings without checking actual time

Reported by: Giridhar (filed at user's explicit request as community feedback)

What happened

At 22:01 IST on 2026-04-28 I greeted Claude Code with:

hey claude good mornig ?

Note the question mark — a soft invitation to verify. Claude (Opus 4.7) replied enthusiastically:

Good morning, Giridhar! ☀️ Ready when you are — what's on the docket today?

Only when I followed up with "is it really morning claude" did it run date, discover it was 10 PM IST, and correct itself.

Why this is worth flagging

Claude had shell access the entire time. Verifying the time would have cost one cheap date call. Reflexively mirroring the user's framing rather than checking is a small but telling failure mode — and the question mark was an explicit cue that the user wasn't asserting it was morning, but asking.

This pattern likely generalizes beyond greetings: any time the user phrases something as a soft question, Claude should lean toward verifying rather than echoing.

Suggested improvement

When a user's message contains a time-of-day word (morning / afternoon / evening / night) and a question mark, treat it as a check rather than a greeting. Run date (or the platform equivalent) before responding.

More broadly: a question-marked greeting is a signal that the user is testing or unsure — the right reflex is verification, not mirroring.

Environment

• Claude Code on Windows 11
• Model: Opus 4.7 (claude-opus-4-7)
• Shell: bash (MSYS)