10 replies

Subagent creation problems

✅Solved

I am having extreme issues creating subagents. I tried all models from Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, GLM4.7 and the bot just fails this simple task. It continuously overwrites by main agent with the "new" agent I want to create. It cannot figure that the agent list, must contain the main agent as well as the new one. I finally managed to fix it by adding the main manually, but any changes I ask it to do to the new agent config, it removed the main one from the list.

Is this a known issue? It shouldn't be that complicated. Do the models have no access to the openclaw docs?

Solution

What you’re seeing lines up with expected semantics of the config RPCs, plus the model making a bad choice:

- config.apply
config.apply
replaces the entire config. If the model sends

{ agents: { list: [ {id:"coder", ...} ] } }

{ agents: { list: [ {id:"coder", ...} ] } }

as a “partial”, it will delete everything else (including

main

main

).
Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/help/faq#configapply-wiped-my-config-how-do-i-recover-and-avoid-this

- config.patch
config.patch
is “JSON merge patch” and the killer detail is: arrays replace. So even with

config.patch

config.patch

, updating

agents.list

agents.list

with a 1‑element array still wipes the rest of the list.
Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/configuration (see

config.patch

config.patch

: “Arrays replace”)

So this isn’t really “subagent creation is broken” as much as: “editing

agents.list

agents.list

via LLM tool calls is a footgun unless the model always fetches the current config and re-sends the full array.”

Practical workaround (recommended)

Use the CLI for agent lifecycle, and

config set

config set

for tweaks:

- Add agent safely:

  openclaw agents add coder

  openclaw agents add coder

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10 replies

Panagiotis

Subagent creation problems

✅Solved

Solution

What you’re seeing lines up with expected semantics of the config RPCs, plus the model making a bad choice:

- config.apply
config.apply
replaces the entire config. If the model sends

{ agents: { list: [ {id:"coder", ...} ] } }

{ agents: { list: [ {id:"coder", ...} ] } }

as a “partial”, it will delete everything else (including

main

main

config.patch

config.patch

, updating

agents.list

agents.list

with a 1‑element array still wipes the rest of the list.
Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/configuration (see

config.patch

config.patch

: “Arrays replace”)

So this isn’t really “subagent creation is broken” as much as: “editing

agents.list

agents.list

via LLM tool calls is a footgun unless the model always fetches the current config and re-sends the full array.”

Practical workaround (recommended)

Use the CLI for agent lifecycle, and

config set

config set

for tweaks:

- Add agent safely:

  openclaw agents add coder

  openclaw agents add coder

Jump to solution

Subagent creation problems

Practical workaround (recommended)

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Practical workaround (recommended)

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