DNS for Human Time
Every person's time is scattered across calendar providers — Google Calendar for work, Outlook for the enterprise, iCloud for personal life. These systems are walled gardens. When AI agents schedule on behalf of humans, they inherit this fragmentation.
Just as DNS resolves a domain name to an IP address, Temporal Cortex resolves a person's identity to their true availability — across every calendar, every provider, every timezone.
We're building the infrastructure that makes this possible: deterministic time math, cross-provider availability merging, and atomic booking that prevents race conditions. Today it's an MCP server. Tomorrow it's the scheduling layer of the agentic web.
What is the vision for Temporal Cortex?
Temporal Cortex is evolving across three horizons: from MCP tools today, to A2A-compliant scheduling agents in 2027, to fully autonomous agent-to-agent scheduling by 2028 — becoming DNS for Human Time.
Today — 2026
The Tool Era
Agents use MCP tools to access calendars. Temporal Cortex provides 11 tools with atomic booking, RRULE expansion, and availability merging. Install with npx and go.
Near future — 2027
The Agent Card Era
Each user gets an A2A-compliant scheduling agent at a stable URL. Agent Cards declare capabilities. External agents discover you via identity resolution.
Future — 2028+
The Agentic Web
Agent-to-agent scheduling in under 2 seconds with zero human intervention. Temporal Cortex becomes pure infrastructure — like DNS resolvers, invisible but essential.
What makes Temporal Cortex different?
Temporal Cortex is the only Calendar MCP server with distributed locking via Two-Phase Commit, deterministic RRULE expansion via Truth Engine (written in Rust with 9,000+ property-based tests), and cross-provider availability merging across Google Calendar, Outlook, and CalDAV.
Distributed Locking (Two-Phase Commit)
Nobody else has this in MCP. Lock → verify → write → release. If any step fails, everything rolls back. Zero double-bookings, even with concurrent agents.
Truth Engine
Deterministic RRULE expansion — not API-dependent, not LLM-dependent. Handles DST transitions, BYSETPOS, EXDATE with timezones, leap year recurrences, and cross-year boundaries. Computed locally, always correct.
Availability Merging
Returns "these slots are free across all calendars" — not raw events for the agent to figure out. Google + Outlook + iCloud merged into one unified view.
Frequently asked questions
What does 'DNS for Human Time' mean?
Just as DNS resolves a domain name to an IP address, Temporal Cortex resolves a person's identity to their true availability — across every calendar provider, every timezone, every scheduling constraint. This is the long-term vision: infrastructure that enables agent-to-agent scheduling without human intervention, like DNS resolvers — invisible but essential.
Who builds Temporal Cortex?
Temporal Cortex is built by Billy Lui as an open-core project. The core libraries (TOON encoder and Truth Engine) are open source under MIT/Apache-2.0. The commercial platform adds safety, metering, and multi-calendar orchestration for teams and enterprises.
What is the MCP protocol?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources. Created by Anthropic and now governed by the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, MCP has over 16,000 servers and 97 million monthly SDK downloads. Temporal Cortex is an MCP server that provides calendar scheduling tools to any MCP-compatible AI agent.
Who builds Temporal Cortex?
Temporal Cortex is built as an open-core project — open-source foundations with a commercial platform for teams and enterprises.
Billy Lui
Founder
Building scheduling infrastructure for the agentic web. Obsessed with deterministic computation, protocol design, and making AI agents reliable.
Get in touch
Building with calendar data? Have questions about Temporal Cortex? Want to explore enterprise or partnership opportunities?