Parse timestamp of first message

[lhoestq]

Hi ! We've been using teich at HF recently as an optional dependency to datasets and the HF Dataset Viewer to parse agent traces :)

In addition to teich parsing we show useful info like the timestamp of first message, do you think it could be included in the metadata for all formats ? Happy to open a PR if you are ok with this

[armand0e]

Thanks, this is great to hear :)

Yes, this makes sense to include in Teich metadata. I think the right field is metadata.first_message_timestamp, populated from the first event that actually maps to a conversation message, not from session/session_meta start time.

For formats that expose per-message timestamps, we should add it across the converters: Codex, Pi/OpenClaw, Claude Code, Hermes/external traces. Not sure if there are any, but if a format does not have a per-message timestamp, we can just leave it out correct?

Happy to take a PR, or I can add this directly since it should be a small converter/test change.

[armand0e]

Also sidebar: I just fixed the mix-up between pi/openclaw.

OpenClaw now has it's own dedicated path, and version was bumped to 0.1.3 to have this change ready for you guys asap.

[armand0e]

I'll leave this open until you can confirm this is the behavior you were looking for.

Essentially now the metadata includes first_message_timestamp

[lhoestq]

Great ! yes this is exactly it, thx for this and the openclaw/pi distinction :) I'll update datasets accordingly