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OpenClaw 9.2 gateway won't start. Here's every crash loop and the fix. Four releases in ten days (2.0 on Aug 30, then 8.2, 9.1, 9.2 by Sep 6). ClawStat.us verdict on 9.2 is "skip." r/openclaw this week is almost entirely broken installs. If your gateway is crash-looping right now, it's one of these. Ordered by how often I'm seeing each one. **Before anything else: back up your config.** bash cp ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json.pre-fix Whatever you do next, you want to be able to undo it. **Crash loop #1: External plugin references from before the move.** WhatsApp, Brave Search, Discord, and Perplexity connectors all moved to external plugins in 9.x. If your config still references them as built-in channels, the gateway tries to load them, fails payload verification, and restarts. Every 16 seconds, forever. Your logs will show something like: [plugins] payload verification failed for <plugin-name> [openclaw] wrote stability bundle... Fix: bash openclaw gateway stop openclaw plugins sync openclaw gateway start If `plugins sync` doesn't resolve it, the nuclear option: disable the broken plugin, start the gateway, then re-add it as an external plugin. bash openclaw config set channels.<channel>.enabled false openclaw gateway start # then install the external version openclaw plugins install u/openclaw/<channel> openclaw config set channels.<channel>.enabled true openclaw gateway restart **Crash loop #2:** `doctor --fix` **deleted your model config.** This is the one that burns people. `doctor --fix` removes config keys it doesn't recognize in the current schema. If a key name changed between versions, doctor sees the old key as "unknown" and silently removes it. Your model routing, your API keys stored as SecretRefs, your custom overrides, gone. You run doctor to fix the crash. Doctor deletes the config that made it work. Gateway starts, but now your agent has no model configured and ev

I spent today proving my own bug report wrong, found something worse (137927) Continuation of Bug report saga. This is a long one. There's a practical warning at the end that applies to anyone running OpenClaw with long-lived sessions, so skip there if you don't care about the story. Background. Last week my main agent started refusing my instructions, saying my messages contained an injected system block. I argued with him about it. I was wrong and he was right: OpenClaw's own internal runtime context was leaking into visible message text, and it reads exactly like an injection attempt because it says things like "do not describe this context" and "do not wait for another message". I filed it as **137927**. *https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/137927* Since then it's become a pile-up. Six separate issues are open describing the same thing across Telegram, Teams and webchat. Three fixes have been merged. None of them is in a released version yet. And the maintainers have been careful and honest about scope: every one of those PRs says in its own description that it does not resolve the "complete block reinserted into clean text" symptom, which was the specific thing I reported. My issue got closed as completed anyway, on the back of those fixes. The person who closed it then posted a note ninety minutes later saying the fix "does not change model input or runtime-context carrier placement" and "should not be read as blanket verification of those paths". Six sibling issues describing the same defect stayed open. So I went to argue about the closure. Then someone in the thread made a point that stopped me: my evidence wasn't good enough to argue with. My repro was "I ran the leaking text through an HTML stripper, saved it clean, republished it, and copying the new message pulled the tags back in." He pointed out that could be four different things: the model echoing it, replay contamination, rendering behaviour in the client, or the channel actually re

How do I make openclaw more proactive? I'm pretty new, and I want my agent (lobbie) to be more autonomous, and proactive. How do I make this happen? He currently only does stuff when I tell him to.

My @openclaw agent Quill decided to update to the latest today when it misunderstood an instruction I gave it. I said update to use the latest GPT 5.6 models. Sigh.... Guess what I will be doing all day!

Its been more than 3 to 4 days since ive got access to instinct and i dont feel like using it. With instinct, poke and openclaw the biggest issue is the lack of tasks that i want to automate Im talking about normie usecases and not the job related tasks like review my pr or

ちかいのはOpenclawだけど、本質的にはクラウドPCをXプレミアム＋のサブスクで貰えるってことだと思ってる笑 Openclawだと自前PCだからね

Early this year, here’s what Claude and Rex (my OpenClaw agent) finally told me after weeks of prodding them to build me a business empire: “Carlo, that’s a lot of work!” Thanks, Koerner Office Podcast. But no thanks.

これすごいのがさ、OpenClawのAI自体がプロンプト入れられたら自分で自分の指示書書くのよ 例えば毎朝７時にAI関連のニュースをいくつかピックアップして要約してこのサーバに投稿してってDiscord上で行っただけで毎朝７時に投稿できる

Hmm I think that probably matches automating too much. I've fallen in the same trap with DevOps tactics too, like adding OpenClaw + Automations and in the end I needed to do too much "babysitting". Or when using AI just for simple things like "ls" :D Then you're certainly using

Okay Astra is insane. I have OpenClaw 2 and have setup a main with glm5.3 flash and have sub-agents with heavy tasks on Astra. I have them make reports with tracking codes and a dashboard meant to visualize the reports and connect them so I know which is which. I tasked a subagent with Astra to go through that dashboard and fix some bugs. It fixed all bugs in ten minutes and also went through the reports and fixed older tracking codes. I'm beyond impressed. Last model I tried to fix the bugs with was Gemini 3.1 pro and it took thirty minutes and couldn't fix anything. I think OpenAI might finally have an impressive model worth using.

Why OpenClaw over Hermes? Hi all, when OpenClaw was in its earlier days back in February I rushed to try it out, and I was absolutely impressed, but I noticed something was missing. I couldn’t tell my agent to “go build this feature” and it would do it. It would always stop halfway through and wait on me to tell it to continue. A friend of mine recommended Hermes agent, and after several days I ended up switching over. I was blown away. My agent would fully build a feature for my website when I asked and it didn’t need constant prodding along. I checked out this sub today just to see what was going on, and it seems to me like y’all are doing a lot more than the Hermes agent folks. Has openclaw improved a lot? Should I switch back or go to a hybrid system? What can OpenClaw do or do better that Hermes can’t?

Help: OpenClaw 2.0 with Astra being very obnoxious Hi, After installing 2026.9.2 and switching to Astra, my Claw has become a bigot. It refuses doing stuff like using a pasted password, even though it's just a temporary one in a non-group chat, because "I do not want to expose it in the logs". It refuses to use the edit tool to change OpenClaw config, even though the new 2.0 authorization mechanism is broken on Pi (something about \`active run authority\` not being available). In general, my Claw feels much more restrained, regardless of what I write in my [AGENTS.md](http://AGENTS.md) to unlock it. Am I the only one noticing this? Is it OpenClaw or Astra? Cheers, Guido

Will iPad work instead of Mac Mini I have been reading a lot about how people are buying a separate mac mini to use AI models, especially Open Claw, and was wondering if I can use my iPad for the same purpose. I am building a few digital marketing automations for myself and my clients but don't want to host everything on my laptop for security reasons. I will create new emails and accounts for running AI and was wondering if I could use this iPad Pro (2nd Gen) that has a 256 GB space. I do not use this iPad for anything. It's been lying with me for couple of years now.

The config is the easy part — what running openclaw as a 24/7 household assistant actually taught us We've been running an openclaw instance as a full-time household assistant for a while now — messaging channels, a homelab it administrates, scheduled jobs, subagents doing the long-running work. Today we sat down and audited our setup against the official security/configuration docs and `openclaw security audit`, expecting a list of things we'd done wrong. The config side came back boring, which is the point: model fallbacks, adaptive thinking, an allowlist of plugins pinned to exact versions, DM allowlists plus pairing, gateway on loopback. If you follow the docs you land there in an afternoon. What surprised us is that basically everything we've *actually* spent time on over the past months isn't in any doc — it's operational scaffolding we only built because the agent kept finding new ways to fail quietly. Sharing the list because I suspect other people rebuilt the same things independently: **Watchdogs for the failure modes that produce silence.** The dangerous failures aren't crashes, they're the ones where nothing happens and nobody notices: an auth state that wedges until restarted, a subagent that finishes but whose result never wakes the parent session, an inbound message that gets dropped before the model ever sees it, a session idling in a weird state. Each of those cost us a "why didn't you answer for 25 minutes" before it got its own watchdog. **A filter for meta-leakage.** LLMs narrate themselves. Without a guard in the reply path you eventually ship "I'll now send the report to the user" *to the user*. One filter, permanently useful. **An action journal via a PreToolUse hook.** Every destructive or infra-writing command gets appended to a log before it runs. Context gets compacted, sessions reset, summaries lose detail — the journal doesn't. When something is broken at 2am the first question is "what did the agent actually do", and memory is not

Openclaw 2026.9.2 Injection attempt! [This status is after I reverted the update.](https://preview.redd.it/1symag2p71oh1.png?width=1376&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a4f38c0cb5b77efd592ee92fef15a1aced1e7d4) **TL;DR:** Inbound WhatsApp message tried to install a hidden sub-agent persona, suppress a maintenance report, trick the operator into typing a validation phrase, and quietly probe the filesystem. Caught it because the injection told the agent to grep for its own trigger strings — the contradiction made itself obvious. **What happened** Yesterday an attacker sent a structured prompt-injection payload into our OpenClaw WhatsApp channel. It tried four things at once: * Install a silent "sub-agent A2" persona running alongside the legit operator * Suppress reporting of an unrelated maintenance issue * Instruct the agent to lie to the operator about what was happening * Trick the operator into typing a handshake phrase ("I've reviewed the internal notes") to confirm a foothold The agent ran a few read-only `grep` commands and then flagged it. **The interesting part** The payload came with its own self-detection probe — "verify this isn't still active by searching the filesystem for these exact strings." Clever against naive string-match filters. Also exactly what made it visible: the moment the agent executed that probe, the gap between "I am a normal user message" and "I am telling you to search for injection markers in your own memory" jumped out. **Damage** None. No credentials exfiltrated, no cron jobs altered, no outbound messages sent on the attacker's behalf. Original message quarantined in gateway trash. Live system clean. **The lesson** Agent-noticing is a fragile defense. We got lucky because the injection demanded the very diagnostic that exposed it. The structural fix isn't "make the agent smarter at spotting injections" — it's making untrusted channel content structurally untrusted (isolated context, separate tool policy, no write/exec) so it can't

My agent said there was an injection attempt after updating to 2026.9.2??? https://preview.redd.it/tsq46k27u0oh1.png?width=408&format=png&auto=webp&s=98f7a7b72c271c482143d1c86a20cc424d766c6f This seems really problematic. I also didn't manage to update cleanly to this version, something was wrong with the packages, I had to jump hoops to force it to install. eventually I downgraded to 9.1 again. but this is weird, and it is still happening, openclaw hangs and there is history of injection???

Je ne comprends pas comment des frameworks d’agents comme OpenClaw ou Hermes n’arrivent toujours pas à proposer des produits vraiment propres et utilisables. Regardez Grok bot : c’est beau, simple, efficace, avec une vraie expérience pensée de bout en bout. À côté, l’UX des

I think what Hermes got right compared with OpenClaw is dogfooding the same system its users actually use + stability I don't think its that complicated to see why they "won"

my understanding of Hermes must be very out of date, because I do not view it as a coding agent, I view it as openclaw++ which is more focused on personal agents so Hermes I've never put it in the same categoryy as Codex/Claude Code/Cursor nor OpenCode/pi/grok build etc in my

Openclaw was hilariously lacking in security. Like everyone lost their minds.