Claude Code Doesn't Know You've Been Gone — Here's the Fix

I first noticed this in Claude Desktop. I'd have a conversation, step away for a few hours, come back and continue — sometimes on a slightly different angle, sometimes just picking up where I left off — and something about the responses felt off. Like Claude was treating it as one continuous thought when the gap had given me time to change direction. My fix was an espanso trigger. I set up :cltime to expand to: Current date/time: Saturday, March 21, 2026 at 09:00 AM. Use this to orient yourself. Typed it at the start of a session or whenever I came back after a break. It worked. Claude recalibrated — less continuation, more reorientation. Problem solved, moved on. Then I switched to Claude Code. I saw timestamps in the session context, assumed the problem was handled, and stopped using :cltime. Reasonable assumption. It wasn't fully handled. The timestamp Claude Code injects tells it what time the session started. It doesn't tell it how much time has passed since then. Come back after