Summary

Async exec completion events are currently routed through the heartbeat/alert path and end up being rendered into the webchat/control-ui conversation as visible System messages.

This pollutes the user-facing transcript with internal runtime notifications that should not appear as normal chat messages.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open OpenClaw Control UI / webchat
2. In a normal conversation, trigger one or more async/background exec calls
3. Wait for those commands to finish
4. Observe that completion notifications are injected back into the conversation as visible System (untrusted): Exec completed ... messages

This is especially obvious when multiple background execs are started in a short period, since each completion can generate another visible System message.

Actual behavior

• Async exec completions are surfaced as visible System messages inside the webchat conversation
• These messages are written into the transcript
• They interrupt the normal user/assistant dialogue flow
• In bursty cases, they can spam the conversation with multiple internal completion notices

Expected behavior

• Exec completion events should not be injected into the user-visible webchat transcript by default
• For webchat/control-ui, they should go to a non-transcript surface instead, such as:
  • an activity indicator
  • a status/event panel
  • a toast/notification layer
• If a visible chat message is ever needed, it should be explicit opt-in behavior rather than the default

Why this is a bug

This is not just noisy UX. It also mixes internal runtime events with user conversation history, which makes the transcript harder to read and reason about. In control-ui/webchat, internal execution lifecycle events should be separated from the chat stream.

Suspected cause

Likely cause: async exec completion events are treated as heartbeat/alert events, and the webchat delivery path renders those events back into the active conversation as System messages.

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

Workaround

A temporary workaround is:

"channels": {
  "defaults": {
    "heartbeat": {
      "showOk": false,
      "showAlerts": false,
      "useIndicator": false
    }
  }
}

This suppresses the noise, but does not address the underlying issue that internal exec completion events are eligible to enter the chat transcript at all.

Scope

Confirmed in webchat / control-ui.
Not claiming the same behavior is necessarily wrong on every channel.