Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.3.12
• lossless-claw: 0.3.0
• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.2.0)
• Channel: Telegram webhook

Problem

lcm_expand_query intermittently fails when called from a main agent session during a normal Telegram gateway request. The error:

Plugin runtime subagent methods are only available during a gateway request.

This worked reliably on OpenClaw 2026.3.11 (expansion took ~70-90s as expected). After upgrading to 2026.3.12, the tool becomes unstable — sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails with the above error in the same session.

Reproduction

1. Send a message via Telegram that triggers lcm_grep → finds summary IDs
2. Call lcm_expand_query with the found summary IDs
3. Tool fails with runtime subagent error

Additional findings

• lcm_grep and lcm_describe work consistently
• lcm_expand returns "lcm_expand is only available in sub-agent sessions" (expected, by design)
• lcm_expand_query is the only path to expand summaries from the main session, and it's broken
• Gateway logs show start events but no corresponding success events when it fails
• The callGateway bridge in index.ts:1094 accesses api.runtime.subagent directly — this appears to be undefined/restricted in some request contexts under 3.12

Gateway log evidence

# Success (2026-03-13 01:25, before the issue manifested consistently):
[gateway] [lcm][expansion_delegation] {"component":"lcm_expand_query","event":"start",...}
[gateway] [lcm][expansion_delegation] {"component":"lcm_expand_query","event":"success",...}

# Failure (2026-03-13 19:15):
[plugins] [lcm][expansion_delegation] {"component":"lcm_expand_query","event":"start",...}
# No success event follows

Note the log prefix changes from [gateway] to [plugins] — suggesting the execution context differs.

Suspected cause

OpenClaw 3.12 changelog includes: "Security/plugin runtime: stop unauthenticated plugin HTTP routes from inheriting synthetic admin gateway scopes when they call runtime.subagent.*". This may have changed when api.runtime.subagent is available to context engine plugins during tool execution.