Current Datetime

Get the current UTC date and time in ISO 8601 format.

What it does

Returns the current date and time in UTC. Agents have no clock of their own, so without this a model will happily reason about 'today' using whatever date it was trained around.

What you need

Nothing. This one runs on RAiN — no key, no account, no per-use cost from the provider.

Connecting it

Nothing to connect. It is available to every project already — tick it on an agent, or choose it in an Action step.

Using it in a step

An Action step runs one tool with the arguments you type, exactly as written, with no model involved — so it costs nothing per run and behaves the same every time. Add one from the canvas toolbar, choose Current Datetime, and fill in:

It takes no arguments — it answers the same question every time.

Values can carry results forward: {{previous}} is the step before, and {{row:column}} is a column from the row this run is about when the trigger fans out.

Press Try it to run the step on its own before committing to a whole sequence.

Using it with an agent

Tick Current Datetime on any agent that should be able to call it, and the agent decides when to. Use an agent when the judgement matters and an Action step when the certainty does.

A worked example

A reminder agent needs to know whether an invoice is overdue. It reads the due date from the row and the real date from here, and compares them.

When it goes wrong

It is UTC, not Lagos. One hour behind. Where a result is stamped for a customer, the project's own clock setting handles the difference — see the results guide.