OpenClaw Update: Core Tool Search, Gateway Stability, and UI Enhancements

The latest set of merged pull requests for OpenClaw focuses on scaling the agent's ability to handle massive tool catalogs while hardening the gateway's reliability. The standout addition is the introduction of Core Tool Search, which fundamentally changes how models interact with available tools, moving from a static list to a dynamic discovery process.

Beyond this major feature, the team has addressed several critical stability issues, including event-loop starvation in the memory core, configuration loss during in-process restarts, and network-level crashes caused by IPv6 resolution errors. These changes collectively ensure that OpenClaw remains responsive and consistent even under heavy load or in complex network environments.

Merged PRs

• fix(telegram): preserve URL inline buttons Original PR
• [codex] reduce plugin sdk surface Original PR
• chore(canvas): refresh a2ui bundle hash Original PR
• Add Telegram real-user Crabbox proof Original PR
• fix(acpx): await startup probe before gateway ready Original PR
• fix(agents): initialize context engines before CLI compaction Original PR
• fix: allow tweakcn theme imports in Control UI CSP Original PR
• fix: preserve Codex auth during route repair Original PR
• fix(onboard): custom provider context window vs compaction floor Original PR
• Fix post-first-message session list stalls Original PR
• fix(control-ui): show Sessions live status Original PR
• [codex] Project Tool Search target calls in transcripts Original PR
• Normalize Codex dynamic tool transcript shape Original PR
• fix: prefer IPv4 for pinned SSRF lookups Original PR
• fix(auto-reply): clear stale heartbeat fallback overrides Original PR
• feat(process): show input-wait hints in log and poll Original PR
• fix(codex): deliver native image outputs Original PR
• fix: reread config on in-process gateway restart Original PR
• feat: add core tool search Original PR
• fix(cli): return null for unknown non-plugin commands instead of suggesting plugins.allow Original PR
• fix(doctor): invalidate persisted plugin registry when a diagnostic source path no longer exists Original PR
• fix: elevated exec defaults across approval followups Original PR
• fix(cron): diagnose isolated pre-model stalls Original PR
• fix(memory): yield during session indexing Original PR

Key Changes

Core Tool Search Capability

OpenClaw now supports Tool Search, a core capability designed for large tool catalogs. Instead of overwhelming the model with every available tool schema, OpenClaw exposes a compact bridge. Models can now search for tools, describe them, and call them on demand. This significantly reduces the provider raw bytes and system prompt characters, as evidenced by E2E tests showing a reduction of 55 declared tools and over 43,000 raw bytes in a sample run.

Gateway Stability & Performance

Several critical fixes were implemented to prevent gateway hangs and crashes:

• Event Loop Yielding: The memory-core session indexing now yields to the event loop between batches, preventing the gateway from blocking for 30+ seconds during large session corpus indexing.
• IPv4 Preference: To resolve gateway crashes on IPv6-unreachable networks (specifically affecting api.anthropic.com), the SSRF guard now prefers IPv4 for pinned lookups, avoiding unreachable AAAA records.
• Config Persistence: A bug was fixed where in-process gateway restarts (common in container environments) reused a stale startup configuration snapshot, which would silently overwrite and drop user-applied configurations in openclaw.json.
• Startup Probing: The ACPX runtime now awaits its startup probe before the gateway declares itself "ready," preventing silent failures for clients attempting to use ACPX immediately after boot.

Control UI & UX Improvements

• Session Liveness: The Sessions table now includes a status column with live/idle badges, allowing operators to distinguish between active processing and dormant sessions.
• Performance Optimization: A fix was introduced to resolve session-switching latency that occurred after the first message was sent, by scoping sessions.list refreshes with the active agentId.
• CSP Updates: The Control UI Content Security Policy (CSP) now allows imports from tweakcn.com, enabling custom theme imports that were previously blocked.

Agent & Tooling Refinements

• Interactive Process Hints: The process log and process poll tools now surface "input-wait" hints, alerting operators when a background CLI session is waiting for stdin (e.g., for 2FA prompts).
• Elevated Execs: Trusted elevated defaults are now preserved across approval follow-up runs, ensuring that subsequent elevated commands in the same turn can request fresh approval rather than failing as unavailable.
• Codex Integration: Native image outputs from the Codex app-server are now delivered as reply media, ensuring that image-generation turns are not treated as empty if no assistant text is present.

Impact

These updates significantly lower the barrier for deploying OpenClaw in production environments. By solving the "stale config" issue in containers and the IPv6 crash loop in restricted networks, the system is far more resilient. The introduction of Tool Search allows users to scale their agent's capabilities to hundreds of tools without hitting model context limits or increasing latency.

From a user experience perspective, the Control UI is now more transparent regarding session states, and the CLI is less misleading, as it no longer suggests adding nonexistent plugins to the plugins.allow list. Finally, the memory core's new yielding behavior ensures that the gateway remains responsive to WebSocket requests even while indexing massive amounts of historical session data.