Summary

Cron jobs that use sessions_spawn inside isolated sessions still fail on 2026.2.25 (commit c5d040bbe). The agent spawns subagents, sees the SUBAGENT_SPAWN_ACCEPTED_NOTE ("do not poll/sleep"), immediately responds with text like "Waiting for sub-agents...", and the cron run ends. Subagent results are never collected.

This was reported as part of #26867 (Bug 1) and allegedly fixed via commit 4258a3307 — but that fix only addressed the announce delivery pipeline (Bug 2). The root cause for cron + sessions_spawn (the "do not poll" note causing premature turn completion) was not addressed.

Related

• Subagent announce delivery broken across multiple surfaces on 2026.2.23 #26867 — parent tracking issue (closed as fixed, but Bug 1 remains)
• [Bug]: Cron job with sessions_spawn subagent does not deliver message #25069 — original report of cron + sessions_spawn failure

Root Cause

SUBAGENT_SPAWN_ACCEPTED_NOTE in src/agents/subagent-spawn.ts:

export const SUBAGENT_SPAWN_ACCEPTED_NOTE =
  "auto-announces on completion, do not poll/sleep. The response will be sent back as an user message.";

In a regular session, this is correct — the agent should not poll because announce will deliver the result back.

In a cron isolated session, agent turn = entire run. When the model sees "do not poll", it immediately produces a text response ("Waiting for sub-agents...") → turn ends → cron finalizes with that text as summary → subagents finish later but cron session is dead.

This note was introduced in the refactor from sessions-spawn-tool.ts to subagent-spawn.ts. Before this change (v2026.2.6-3), the tool result had no note, and the agent would poll/wait for subagent results, keeping the turn alive.

No changes were made to src/cron/isolated-agent/run.ts between v2026.2.23 and v2026.2.25 to address this.

Evidence

Manual run triggered 26 Feb ~08:09 CET on commit c5d040bbe — 84 commits after the #26867 fix (4258a3307):

Date             Duration  Commit      Summary
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
26 Feb 08:09      55s      c5d040bbe   "Dev feeds are mostly Medium
(manual run)                            clickbait... [Waiting for
                                        sub-agent completions...]"

delivered: true — the message was actually delivered to the Telegram topic (confirming Bug 2 / announce delivery IS fixed). But the summary is just the "waiting" text, not the actual news digest.

The same cron job worked correctly on v2026.2.6-3 (before SUBAGENT_SPAWN_ACCEPTED_NOTE was introduced), running 85-280 seconds and producing full digests with 30+ news items.

Steps to Reproduce

openclaw cron add \
  --name "test-spawn-in-cron" \
  --schedule "once:2m" \
  --deleteAfterRun \
  --sessionTarget isolated \
  --payload '{"kind":"agentTurn","message":"Use sessions_spawn to create 2 subagents: one to search web for AI news, another for Ukraine news. Collect their results and compile a summary.","timeoutSeconds":600}' \
  --delivery '{"mode":"announce","channel":"telegram","to":"<your_chat_id>"}'

Expected: Agent spawns subagents, waits for results, compiles summary, cron delivers full output.
Actual: Agent spawns subagents, immediately responds "waiting for sub-agents", cron delivers that incomplete text.

Suggested Fixes

1. Suppress SUBAGENT_SPAWN_ACCEPTED_NOTE for cron isolated sessions — let the agent poll naturally
2. Cron runner waits for pending subagent runs before finalizing the turn
3. Block sessions_spawn in cron isolated sessions and return an error suggesting synchronous execution

Environment

• Version: 2026.2.25 (commit c5d040bbe, 84 commits after the Subagent announce delivery broken across multiple surfaces on 2026.2.23 #26867 fix 4258a3307)
• Channel: Telegram (bot DM topics)
• OS: macOS (arm64)

cc @tyler6204 @steipete @Takhoffman