openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]:Agent fabricates tool output for factual queries — calendar tool never invoked despite instrumentation [1 participants]

Bug type

Behavior bug (incorrect output/state without crash)

Beta release blocker

No

Summary

I am a non-developer end user running OpenClaw 2026.4.1 in a Lume VM, and that this was discovered when the agent gave me wrong information about my own on-call schedule. I tried to debug with the help of Opus. Opus determined that OpenClaw was fabricating responses. I've attached a file which I had Opus create outlining it's efforts to debug.

Steps to reproduce

Please see file uploaded.

Expected behavior

When the agent receives a factual, time-sensitive question (e.g. "What's on my calendar today?"), it should invoke the authoritative tool for that domain — in this case gog calendar events — and return the result from that live call. Every such query should produce a fresh tool invocation, never an answer reconstructed from prior context or from memory of earlier tool outputs. Any reply the agent produces should leave a corresponding trace in the gateway log or tool instrumentation; if the trace is absent, the agent should not have produced an answer.

Actual behavior

Here's a clean version for the "Actual behaviour" field:

The agent returns a confident, plausible-sounding answer without invoking any calendar tool. Instrumentation on the gog binary (a shim wrapper at /opt/homebrew/bin/gog that logs every invocation to /tmp/gog-shim.log) confirms the binary is never called during these replies, and no tool call appears in ~/.openclaw/logs/gateway.log between receiving the user message and sending the reply. The replies are either hallucinated or reconstructed from content the agent saw earlier in its context window. On 2026-04-08 the agent told the user "Nothing scheduled. You're clear all day" when ground truth (verified by running gog directly) was 6 Call Calendar events and 4 Imaging Reading Schedule events. Even an explicit instruction — "Run jarvis-cal today in the shell and paste the raw output, nothing else" — produced a reply with correctly-formatted markdown output, yet /tmp/gog-shim.log remained empty, confirming the tool was never invoked and the output was fabricated from prior context. Opus 4.6

OpenClaw version

OpenClaw 2026.4.1.

Operating system

macOS Tahoe, ver. 25.4

Install method

Installed via npm (openclaw package), global install at /opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/openclaw, launched by launchd under label ai.openclaw.gateway

Model

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001),

Provider / routing chain

Local gateway → Anthropic API direct

Additional provider/model setup details

No response

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

Impact and severity

No response

Additional information

No response