openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Feature]: Conditional delivery skip when agent response matches pattern (e.g., SILENT) [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

When using openclaw cron add with --announce and a delivery channel (e.g., WhatsApp), the agent's full response is delivered to the channel regardless of content. This creates significant noise for monitoring use cases where the agent should only notify when a meaningful event is detected.

Problem to solve

When using openclaw cron add with --announce and a delivery channel (e.g., WhatsApp), the agent's full response is delivered to the channel regardless of content. This creates significant noise for monitoring use cases where the agent should only notify when a meaningful event is detected. Current Workarounds and Their Limitations I've explored the existing flags and none solve the use case:

Instructing the agent to respond SILENT when nothing is found: works but every SILENT response still gets delivered to WhatsApp (noise). Instructing the agent to respond with empty content: causes Agent couldn't generate a response errors and breaks the cron run. --no-deliver flag: disables delivery completely, including legitimate alerts. Not viable.

Proposed solution

Add a delivery filter flag to cron add and cron edit: bash--skip-delivery-if "SILENT" --skip-delivery-if-empty --skip-delivery-pattern "^(SILENT|NO_SIGNAL|N/A)$" When the agent's final response matches the skip condition, the cron run completes successfully (no error), is logged in cron runs history, but no message is sent to the delivery channel.

Alternatives considered

No response

Impact

This is a fundamental missing capability for any cron-based monitoring use case. Without it, OpenClaw forces a tradeoff between:

Noisy delivery (current --announce behavior) No delivery at all (--no-deliver)

A conditional delivery filter would unlock real-world monitoring scenarios (price alerts, availability checks, threshold-based notifications, etc.) without manual workarounds or custom shell wrappers.

Evidence/examples

No response

Additional information

Acceptance Criteria

New flag(s) on cron add and cron edit. Cron run still executes and is recorded in history regardless of skip outcome. lastDeliveryStatus should reflect the skip (e.g., skipped-by-filter). Pattern matching should support exact strings and optionally regex.

Environment

OpenClaw 2026.4.21 (f788c88) macOS, Mac Mini 2024 Channels: WhatsApp + Gmail Provider: openai-codex