James Aspinwall — February 2026
Jimmy, here’s the quick rundown on the NIS scheduling bug and the fix.
The Problem
When you tell the AI chat “follow up with this contact tomorrow” or “schedule next action for Monday,” it needs to convert that into a precise Unix timestamp — the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 that computers use to represent time.
The issue: the AI had no idea what timezone you’re in or what time it is for you. It was receiving tool descriptions like “next_action_due: Unix seconds” with zero context about the user’s local clock. So when you said “tomorrow,” it was computing timestamps based on UTC or whatever default assumption the model made — which could land several hours off, making tasks appear 2 or 3 days in the future depending on where you are and what time of day you asked.
Think of it like telling someone in London “call me tomorrow morning” without telling them you’re in Germany. Their “tomorrow morning” is a different moment in time than yours — and a computer defaulting to UTC is basically always sitting in London.
The Fix
The server now injects live time context into every tool description that deals with dates or scheduling. When the AI requests its list of available tools, each time-sensitive tool’s description now includes something like:
[User timezone: Europe/Berlin (UTC+01:00). Current local time: 2026-02-23 09:30. Unix now: 1740296400]This gives the AI three anchors:
- The timezone name — so it knows the offset rules
- The current local time — human-readable, no ambiguity
- The current Unix timestamp — a reference number it can do arithmetic from
The context is computed fresh on every request, so it’s always accurate.
How to Test It
Via the Chat (workingagents.ai/chat)
- Go to workingagents.ai/chat
-
Ask the AI to create a contact with a relative date:
- “Create a contact named Test Person, follow up tomorrow at 9am”
- Or: “Log an interaction with Test Person — next action: call them Monday at 10am”
- Then ask: “What time is the follow-up I just scheduled for Test Person?”
- The AI should report back the correct time in your local timezone — not hours off or a day wrong
Via the NIS Page (workingagents.ai/nis)
- Go to workingagents.ai/nis
- After creating a contact through chat, find them in the contact list
- Check the “Next Contact” date shown on the contact card
- It should match what you asked for — if you said “tomorrow at 9am” on a Sunday, it should show Monday 9:00 AM, not Monday afternoon or Tuesday
The Smoking Gun
If you create a follow-up for “tomorrow at 9am” and the NIS page shows it as tomorrow at 4pm or the day after, the timezone bug is back. The offset between what you asked for and what got stored is the giveaway — it’ll be a round number of hours matching the UTC difference for your location.