OpenClaw Signals: Async Plugins, Rate-Limit Discovery, and State Machine Proposals
Tools
This PR refactors the plugin loading mechanism to be async, which should prevent startup hangs when a single plugin is slow or unresponsive. It's a big reliability win for anyone running OpenClaw in production with a flaky plugin ecosystem.
A new CLI flag allows inspecting the resolved config of a running instance without a restart, showing the merged output from all sources. This is daily-driver utility for debugging config drift in staging or production.
Analysis
Proposal: Formal Task State Machine
The proposal suggests a formal state machine for task lifecycle instead of the current ad-hoc status flags. This would make debugging and building reliable retry policies much easier, but it's a significant architectural change to track.
News
Metrics Under-Counting Bug Squashed
This patch fixes a subtle bug where the metrics collector under-reported task counts during high concurrency, leading to misleading dashboards. If you rely on OpenClaw's built-in metrics for alerting, you'll want this fix.
Dependency Resolver Gets Timeout Guard
The dependency resolver now has a hard timeout to prevent it from hanging indefinitely on circular or malformed dependency graphs. This stops a whole class of 'stuck scheduler' incidents that users have been reporting.
Discussion
Debate: Automatic Rate-Limit Discovery
The issue proposes that OpenClaw automatically learns and applies rate limits for external APIs based on observed errors, rather than requiring manual configuration. It's a smart move towards more autonomous, resilient task execution.
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