openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix clawsweeper[bot]: auto-close fires on `verdict:needs-human` reviews (bug)

Summary

clawsweeper[bot] auto-closes PRs where its own durable review verdict is clawsweeper-verdict:needs-human, not close. The bot's analysis body in the same review can simultaneously contain "Keep this PR open" and "Canonical path: Close this PR" — and the close-application workflow fires regardless.

Reproduction

• PR with the contradictory verdict and auto-close: openclaw/openclaw#85972
• Durable review comment showing the contradiction: #issuecomment-4527766472
• Auto-close action: #issuecomment posted at 2026-05-24T09:48:41Z with <!-- clawsweeper-close-applied item=85972 -->
• The verdict marker in the review comment: <!-- clawsweeper-verdict:needs-human item=85972 sha=c0f4549eaf7a97cc675f6d6a8632b218c220d214 confidence=high -->

The marker says needs-human. The action says close-applied. These two should not coexist.

Bot's own analysis snippets from the same comment

"Keep this PR open: current main and the latest release still lack daemon-time eviction for cached memory managers, and the branch is a focused follow-up to the already-merged CLI teardown work"

"Idle eviction with in-flight protection is the right implementation direction, but the config contract and exact-head real behavior proof need to be fixed before merge."

"Canonical path: Close this PR as superseded by https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/40389."

The "Keep this PR open" and "Canonical path: Close" sentences are in the same comment.

Pattern

This is the second consecutive PR (predecessor: #85910) on the same topic that was auto-closed within minutes of opening. Both close decisions cite "duplicate of #40389" even though the bot's analysis acknowledges the two PRs target different lifecycle phases (CLI shutdown vs. continuous daemon eviction).

Expected behavior

When the verdict marker is needs-human:

• The PR should remain open and route to human review,
• Or, at minimum, the close workflow should be gated on clawsweeper-verdict:close-recommended (or equivalent), not on the textual presence of "Canonical path: Close" in the review body.

Workflow run links

• Round 3 sweep that emitted the contradictory verdict and triggered auto-close: https://github.com/openclaw/clawsweeper/actions/runs/26357789895

Suggested fix direction (not authoritative)

Inspect the close-decision branch in the sweep workflow. The condition that triggers clawsweeper-close-applied should respect the verdict: marker, not parse natural-language sentences from the review body.

Impact

• Contributor PRs that pass three rounds of bot-driven technical fixes get auto-closed anyway.
• Human maintainers don't get pinged because the verdict marker is needs-human but the PR is closed, so it falls out of the "open for review" queue without ever surfacing.
• The duplicate close on #85910 and #85972 also signals that pattern matching against "duplicate or superseded" is over-eager for follow-up PRs that build on already-merged work.