openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Default deliveryMode silently forces 'announce' when neither --announce nor --no-deliver is set [1 comments, 2 participants]

Severity: medium / Confidence: high / Category: bug Triage: confirmed-bug Detected against: openclaw v2026.5.18 (latest stable at time of scan, 2026-05-18) Tooling: clawpatch 0.3.0 + acpx/claude-sonnet-4-5 via Brad Mills protocol

Evidence

• src/cli/cron-cli/register.cron-add.ts:183-192 (deliveryMode)

const deliveryMode =
            isIsolatedLikeSessionTarget && payload.kind === "agentTurn"
              ? hasAnnounce
                ? "announce"
                : hasNoDeliver
                  ? "none"
                  : "announce"
              : undefined;

Reasoning

When neither --announce nor --no-deliver is passed (hasAnnounce=false, hasNoDeliver=false), the ternary falls through to the final "announce" branch. This means every agentTurn job silently gets delivery mode 'announce' even when the user never requested delivery. The --announce flag warning/help text and downstream behavior imply delivery should be opt-in.

Reproduction

Run openclaw cron add --name test --every 10m --message hi --agent my-agent. No delivery flags given; the submitted params will contain delivery.mode='announce'.

Recommendation

Change the final fallback from "announce" to undefined (or "none"), and only set deliveryMode when the user explicitly passed a delivery flag. Also guard the delivery params block behind deliveryMode !== undefined.

Why existing tests miss this

No unit tests exist for registerCronAddCommand option resolution.

Suggested regression test

Test that params.delivery is undefined when neither --announce nor --no-deliver is supplied to registerCronAddCommand.

Minimum fix scope

Change the trailing : "announce" in the deliveryMode ternary to : undefined, and wrap the delivery params object construction to skip when deliveryMode is undefined.

Standardized clawpatch finding. Persistent in v2026.5.18 (not resolved by upgrading from v2026.5.12). Finding ID: fnd_sig-feat-cli-command-1de66cf308-_e8296f8ba2.