## What
**Three separate commits landed a future-dated FNXC stamp this
evening**, each turning this blocking gate red on main (#3261 fixed six
across five engine files; #3270 fixes a third in core). This makes the
failure message actionable. Tooling only.
The message said *"Use the current date and a real clock time."* That
tells the author to use the value they already believed they had. It now
prints the exact stamp:
```
Current UTC stamp to use: 2026-07-31-23:39
```
Copy-paste instead of a second judgement call, computed only on a path
that has already failed.
## Why a message change rather than a rule
**The offsets are the evidence.** `00:50` against `23:34`; the engine
batch similar — consistently **1–2 hours into tomorrow**, not wrong
dates. That is the shape of a clock or timezone difference, not
carelessness, and no amount of restating the rule fixes a clock.
AGENTS.md already says to take the stamp from `date -u`; three actors
violated it in one evening anyway.
**I am one of those actors** — I have broken this rule twice today. So
this is not a complaint about anyone's diligence; it is an argument that
the instruction is doing less work than a printed value would.
## I made the same mistake inside this change
The FNXC comment documenting the fix was stamped **two minutes ahead**
of the real UTC time. Corrected from `date -u`.
**The gate did not catch it** — it scans `packages/` and not `scripts/`,
so FNXC stamps in the tooling itself are entirely unchecked. That is a
genuine scope gap and I am reporting rather than closing it: pulling
`scripts/` into scope would surface existing stamps across the tooling
and needs its own baseline pass, which does not belong in a message fix.
There is something clarifying about writing a future-dated stamp *in the
fix for future-dated stamps*, in a file the checker cannot see. It is
the same lesson this whole session kept producing — **an instrument's
blind spot is invisible in exactly the way its subject is** — and I
walked into it while holding the flashlight.
```
lint clean; gate prints the stamp on failure
```
<!-- This is an auto-generated comment: release notes by coderabbit.ai
-->
## Summary by CodeRabbit
* **Bug Fixes**
* Improved validation feedback for future-dated entries by showing the
exact UTC timestamp format and value to use when corrections are needed.
<!-- end of auto-generated comment: release notes by coderabbit.ai -->
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