Where the term comes from In the conversation with Granola CEO Chris Pedregal, “the problem of time travel” is the name Pedregal gives to a fundamental design challenge for AI agents: agents take real time to work, so the moment you start a task and the moment you check the result are disconnected [^b241b253-ce39-55fe-8d0d-8b79bea28e90@2099]. While the agent is off doing the work, you are no longer standing at the point in your workflow where the answer is useful — as if the answer had to “travel” through time to reach you when you actually need it.