openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Bug: overwrites existing model catalog entries [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

openclaw config set replaces the entire agents.defaults.models object when adding models for additional providers, which makes previously configured models disappear. This is surprising in normal multi-provider setup flows and feels like a bug or at least a dangerous UX footgun.

Version

OpenClaw 2026.4.15

Expected behavior

Adding another model/provider should either:

• merge into the existing agents.defaults.models object, or
• warn clearly that setting the object path replaces the full object, with docs/examples steering users to set nested keys instead.

Actual behavior

When using openclaw config set agents.defaults.models ... multiple times with different JSON objects, each call overwrites the entire agents.defaults.models map.

Reproduction

Start with a config where agents.defaults.models is empty or minimal.

Run:

openclaw config set agents.defaults.models '{"openai-codex/gpt-5.4":{}}' --strict-json
openclaw config set agents.defaults.models '{"anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6":{}}' --strict-json

Result

After the second command, the config contains only:

{
  "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6": {}
}

The previously configured openai-codex/gpt-5.4 entry is gone.

Why this hurts

This is easy to hit while interactively configuring multiple providers/models. The CLI shape suggests incremental configuration, but object-path set behaves as full replacement. That makes multi-provider setup brittle and confusing.

Suggestions

1. Merge object values by default for map-like config paths such as agents.defaults.models, or
2. add a --merge mode, or
3. emit a warning whenever setting an existing object path will replace sibling keys, and
4. update docs with recommended commands like:

openclaw config set 'agents.defaults.models["openai-codex/gpt-5.4"]' '{}' --strict-json
openclaw config set 'agents.defaults.models["anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6"]' '{}' --strict-json

Additional context

I hit this while configuring a multi-provider catalog across OpenAI Codex, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Google Gemini, and GitHub Copilot.