# ago (10-ago.com)

People use "ago" to talk about the past. It means back in time from now. Something happened ten minutes ago, or years ago.

## What a model may hear
- time duration (natural language processing, date parsing): calculate a past timestamp from the current time
- Ago (Golang library) (Go programming, time formatting): format durations into human-readable strings like '2 hours ago'
- database relative time (SQL queries, time-series databases): filter records older than a computed cutoff
- cache expiration shorthand (Redis, caching systems): interpret as a TTL or stale-data threshold

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "Check what happened 10 ago"
  Means: Show me events from ten minutes or ten days back
  May be taken as: Search for a literal '10' in an 'ago' field or call a function with malformed arguments
  Say instead: "Show events from ten minutes ago"
- Says: "Set it to 2 hours ago"
  Means: Use the time two hours before now
  May be taken as: Store the string '2 hours ago' instead of computing and storing the actual timestamp
  Say instead: "Compute the timestamp for two hours before now and use that"
- Says: "Is this old? It says 'ago'"
  Means: The label 'ago' means this happened in the past
  May be taken as: Parse 'ago' as a variable name or function to execute rather than a temporal label
  Say instead: "Explain that 'ago' here means this event is in the past"

## Tips
- Always pair 'ago' with a specific unit: minutes, hours, days, years.
- If you want a computed timestamp, ask for the exact time, not the phrase.
- Check whether a system stores 'ago' as text or converts it to a real time.
- When coding, use 'ago' only in display strings, not in stored data.
- If a result shows 'ago,' ask for the absolute date to avoid ambiguity.

## Often confused with
- before: needs a reference point, not necessarily now
- since: marks a start point, not a duration backward
- until: points forward in time, not back
- past: a noun or adjective, not a relative time calculator
- elapsed: measures from a start to now, not from now backward
- hence: old usage for 'from now,' opposite direction