By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
Recent updates focus on resolving context loss in long Codex sessions, fixing gateway restart loops under custom supervisors, and introducing a structured linting contract for the doctor tool.
This update covers a series of critical fixes and feature enhancements merged into OpenClaw between May 17 and May 18, 2026. The changes primarily target the stability of the Codex extension, the reliability of the gateway process under various supervision topologies, and the expansion of the doctor command's diagnostic capabilities.
Several PRs addressed critical failures in how Codex handles long-term session state and provider-specific data:
nominiclawdeny: ["*"] policies. Previously, some native tool surfaces (like code mode and built-in environments) remained available even when a sender was denied all tools.HTTP 400 errors during context compaction, the Gemini transport now validates thought_signature Base64 strings. If a signature is truncated mid-token during compaction, it is dropped silently rather than causing the entire assistant turn to fail.Significant work was done to prevent crash loops and improve process management:
EADDRINUSE crash loops. Unmanaged restarts are now kept in-process to maintain PID stability.stop and /stop commands now bypass inbound debounce buffers immediately, ensuring that abort requests are processed without delay and cancel any pending buffered prompts.doctor)The doctor command has been evolved from a procedural repair tool into a structured health-check framework:
detect() / repair() contract separates diagnosis from application. This enables a new openclaw doctor --lint mode for read-only workspace validation.These changes collectively reduce the operational friction for both end-users and maintainers. The fix for gateway restarts eliminates a permanent failure mode for users running OpenClaw under custom supervisors, while the Codex context and Gemini transport fixes ensure that long-running AI sessions remain coherent and stable.
From a developer perspective, the new doctor --lint capability allows for better CI integration and preflight checks, ensuring that workspace health can be validated without the risk of accidental mutation. Additionally, the restoration of verbose tool progress in Discord improves the transparency of long-running operations, addressing a common user pain point where silent tool execution was perceived as a system hang.