Feature Request: Real, trustworthy timestamps on every message — current workaround and 11 related open requests
Title
Feature Request: Real, trustworthy timestamps on every message — current workaround and 11 related open requests
Body
I've spent significant time trying to get a reliable timestamp on Claude
Code messages, and I believe this is a widely shared need, not a personal
preference.
The problem: Claude Code does not reliably surface a trustworthy
timestamp per message. When asked to produce one inline, results are
inconsistent and sometimes simply wrong — not reflecting the real system
clock at all. This makes searching or auditing session history by time
unreliable.
Related requests already open: this issue overlaps with at least 11
others, including #2441, #44763, #30745, #21051, and specifically #60492
("Agent invents timestamp when writing to files"), which describes the
exact failure mode I ran into.
What I'd like: a first-class, model-independent timestamp attached to
every message at write time — generated by Claude Code's own process, not
requested from or generated by the model — available both for on-screen
display and for anything reading the session transcript afterward.
Current workaround: I built a local workaround using the existing.jsonl session transcripts (which already contain a timestamp field
per message) ingested into a SQLite database with a created_at DEFAULT column, so the timestamp is generated by the database
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
engine rather than the model. This works, but it's an external patch, not
a native feature, and most users won't build this themselves.
I've written it up as a plain-English prompt (not a plugin, not code you
have to trust blind) anyone can paste into their own Claude Code CLI:
https://github.com/mjc02840/claude-code-live-timestamp
Happy to share more detail on the workaround if useful context for a
native fix.
— mjc02840