Tempo is deceptively deep. ISO 8601-2 lets you say remarkably precise things — "June 2004, approximately", "the second Monday of every month", "some day in the 1560s", "1200 give or take 60 years" — but the syntax is obtuse, and on top of it sit enumeration, set algebra, Allen relations (crisp and graded-under-uncertainty), recurrence, dependency scheduling, and constraint networks. Even when you know exactly what you want, it isn't obvious which layer solves it or how to spell the value.
So the fastest way into Tempo is often to describe your problem in plain language and let an AI assistant map it to Tempo for you. Tempo ships a Claude skill that does exactly this: it picks the right layer, writes the value in correct ~o"…" syntax, validates and runs it, and explains the result — as code for a developer, or as a plain-language answer for a researcher who never wants to see Elixir.
What the skill does
Give it a sentence like any of these and it will represent and solve it:
- "Do these two delivery windows clash?" → Allen relations (
overlaps?,relation/2). - "When is everyone free for an hour on Monday?" → set algebra (
difference,intersection) and bookableslots/3. - "List the second Monday of every month next year." → recurrence (
RRule.parse!→to_interval). - "Given these radiocarbon dates ±, which finds could be contemporary?" → graded relations (
overlap_certainty,certainly_before?). - "Order these dependent tasks and find the critical path." →
Tempo.Schedule. - "These reigns and strata only have relative dates — are they consistent, and what do they pin down?" →
Tempo.Network+ the STP solver.
Because ISO 8601-2 is easy to get subtly wrong (2004-06~-11 and 2004-?06-11 mean different things), the skill's first rule is to never present a value it hasn't validated — it parses every representation and echoes its meaning back with Tempo.explain/1 before building on it.
Installing the skill
The skill ships as a Claude Code plugin from the Tempo GitHub repo, so improvements reach every user without waiting on a hex release. Install it once:
/plugin marketplace add kipcole9/tempo
/plugin install tempo@tempo-plugins
Pull later updates with /plugin marketplace update tempo-plugins. Skills load at the start of a session, so open a fresh Claude Code session after installing.
The skill source lives at skills/tempo/ in the repo (a SKILL.md plus an ISO 8601-2 cheat-sheet and a recipe catalogue). If you work from a local checkout and would rather not use the plugin, symlink it into your user skills directory instead:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -s "$PWD/skills/tempo" ~/.claude/skills/tempo # from a Tempo checkout
A symlink tracks the checkout, so skill edits are picked up immediately — handy while developing.
Using it
Just describe the problem. You don't need to name a function or know the syntax:
"I have a hearth carbon-dated to about 1200 ± 60 years and a midden to about 1240 ± 40. Could they be from the same generation?"
The assistant will represent each as ~o"1200±60Y" / ~o"1240±40Y" (validating them), reach for Tempo.overlap_certainty/2, and answer: "They might be contemporary, but the dates aren't tight enough to be sure." Ask it to "show the Elixir" if you want the code.
Coming next: the Tempo MCP
The skill teaches an assistant to write and run Tempo inside a coding session. A companion MCP server (planned; see the tool spec in the repo) will expose Tempo's operations as callable tools — parse, explain, relate, set, occurrences, schedule, network — so an assistant can execute Tempo for you with no project checkout and no terminal. That's aimed squarely at researchers, historians, and archaeologists: describe a temporal question in a chat client and get a grounded answer back, in your own language, without touching code.