[Bug]: message_sent / before_message_write hooks never fire for webchat and openclaw-tui outbound paths

Repo: openclaw/openclaw Related: #50126 (umbrella: inconsistent hook coverage across outbound paths), #47472 (plugin hook never fires for extension plugins)

Summary

Outbound message lifecycle hooks — including message_sent, message_sending, agent_end, and before_message_write — are never triggered when the assistant replies through the webchat or openclaw-tui channels. This is a specific manifestation of the fragmentation described in #50126, which currently enumerates Telegram, outbound-send-service, Discord, and WhatsApp, but does not mention webchat/tui.

Any hook that depends on knowing when an assistant reply has been emitted is silently broken for users running the default local install (webchat / openclaw-tui are the primary first-run surfaces).

Impact

• Any workspace or plugin hook that wants to react to the assistant sending a reply cannot observe those replies when the surface is webchat or openclaw-tui.
• Common use-cases that quietly break:
  • Desktop / OS notification when assistant finishes a reply
  • Conversation-stream / audit log consumers
  • Metrics/telemetry on outbound throughput
  • Guardrails that want a post-send hook to verify compliance
• Because these are the default surfaces, new OpenClaw users will silently observe zero hook fires and conclude hooks are broken end-to-end.

Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.4.20
• Node: v24.13.0
• OS: macOS 25.4.0 (Darwin, arm64)
• Surfaces tested: webchat, openclaw-tui
• Agent: laststance-manager (default workspace-bound agent)
• Runtime: anthropic/claude-opus-4-7

Reproduction

1. Create a workspace hook, for example ~/clawd/hooks/notification-on-send/HOOK.md:

   ---
   metadata:
     openclaw:
       emoji: "📩"
       events: ["message_sent"]
   ---

   with a companion handler.ts that calls terminal-notifier or simply writes a line to a log file.

2. Enable the hook in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

   "hooks": {
     "internal": {
       "enabled": true,
       "entries": {
         "notification-on-send": { "enabled": true }
       }
     }
   }

3. Start an openclaw-tui or webchat session and have the assistant produce any reply.

4. Expected: handler runs → notification fires / log line appended.

5. Actual: handler is never invoked. No entry in the hook log. No error either — it is silent.

We also verified the same non-firing behaviour for before_message_write and agent_end. The hook registration itself is correct (the same HOOK.md + handler.ts pair does fire under different event names such as before_compaction; see notes below).

What we observed in the source

Scanning the bundled dist shows that hooks for the assistant reply lifecycle are attached at the channel delivery layer (e.g. deliverOutboundPayloads / deliverReplies). #50126 describes this in detail and lists which channels are and are not wired up. Webchat and openclaw-tui do not appear in any of the enumerated dispatch tables in #50126, and empirically do not appear to invoke the hook runner on outbound reply.

By contrast, compaction-lifecycle hooks (before_compaction, after_compaction) are invoked from core runtime code (compaction-runtime-context-*.js, selection-*.js) and fire correctly on webchat/tui. This is additional evidence that the gap is specifically in the webchat/tui outbound path, not in the hook registration or dispatcher itself.

Suggested direction (aligned with #50126)

Prefer the minimal, channel-local fix first, and leave the architectural unification for #50126 proper:

• Option B (local fix): in the webchat/openclaw-tui outbound dispatch path, pass sessionKeyForInternalHooks and hookRunner (or their equivalents) so message_sending / message_sent fire symmetrically with the core deliverOutboundPayloads path.
• Option A (architectural): follow the OutboundDeliveryObserver suggestion in #50126 so every channel dispatch path goes through one hook-firing seam.

Happy to open a PR targeting Option B for the webchat/tui paths once a maintainer confirms the preferred direction. If it is already covered by the in-flight PR #12584 ("wire outbound message lifecycle hooks"), please point us there and we can help test / verify coverage for webchat + openclaw-tui.

Notes

• Workaround today: call terminal-notifier (or any other notifier) from the assistant reply itself via the exec tool. This works but is a per-turn manual step and is exactly the kind of boilerplate hooks are supposed to eliminate.
• We are happy to provide additional logs, a minimal reproduction repo, or a PR against Option B — whichever is most useful to maintainers.