WORK / 2026-05-12
OpenClaw: one clear completion
Investigating duplicate agent notifications, and designing a fix that still lets failures retry.
Upstream proposal · closed, unmerged
A sketch of the proposed delivery flow.
When “done” arrives twice
A task should finish with a clear handover. In OpenClaw, different completion and retry paths could race to announce the same agent result, producing duplicate messages in a Slack thread. I investigated the overlap and submitted a focused upstream fix.
Keep the success. Let failure retry.
The proposal brings concurrent requests for the same announcement into one delivery attempt. Only a successful delivery is remembered. A failed or interrupted attempt stays retryable, so preventing duplicate messages does not silently swallow a result that never arrived.
A small reliability problem, made concrete
The pull request includes tests for concurrent calls, repeat delivery, isolated keys and failed attempts. Its reproduction used the real delivery path with a stubbed outbound transport. The PR was closed without merging; it records my proposed approach, rather than a released OpenClaw feature.
Investigation and proposed patch: Eric Cheung (EricCheungAO). OpenClaw is an independent open-source project.