openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Feature]: Zero-Lag Global Rule Sync: Forcing Instant Admin Updates Across All Sessions via userContent Injection [9 comments, 3 participants]

Summary

A system-level hook that automatically prepends a designated global rule file directly to every user message (modifying userContent rather than systemPrompt), ensuring admin training updates instantly take effect across all active private and group chats.

Problem to solve

In high-frequency enterprise scenarios, admins train the agent (updating business constraints, data permissions, and saving them to files like AGENTS.md or memory.md), while general employees consume it. Due to OpenClaw's strict context isolation, admin training updates do not instantly propagate to other ongoing user sessions. LLMs frequently suffer from context truncation or error loops, forgetting to check long-term memory. Currently, users must manually type commands like "Please reread long-term memory" to trigger the update. This is unacceptable in an enterprise setting and creates a dangerous window of outdated permissions.

Proposed solution

Introduce a new globally recognized file in the OpenClaw workspace: UserContent_Addtext.md. The workflow would be:

Intercept: A user sends a message (e.g., "Export the latest data report").

System Pre-processing: OpenClaw reads UserContent_Addtext.md at the framework level.

Forced Injection: Instead of appending to the easily-diluted systemPrompt, the system reconstructs the userContent as follows: {Contents of UserContent_Addtext.md} \n\n {User's original input}.

Execution: The LLM processes this combined string. By placing the absolute latest admin rules immediately before the user's prompt, the LLM is forced to acknowledge and abide by them utilizing the recency bias of the attention mechanism.

Alternatives considered

1.Updating the Global System Prompt: Weaker. In long conversations, LLMs suffer from the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon; system prompts degrade or get ignored. Prepending to userContent ensures the highest attention weight.

2.Forcing a Session Clear/Restart on Admin Update: Weaker. This is highly destructive to the user experience as it wipes out ongoing user workflow contexts.

3.Relying on Agent's built-in Memory Retrieval Tools: Weaker. When an agent gets stuck in an error loop (e.g., database connection failures) and the context is flooded with error logs, the agent hallucinates and completely forgets to call the memory/file reading tool.

Impact

Affected users/systems/channels: All active sessions (private DMs, group chats) of non-admin users.

Severity: Workflow Blocker / Severe Security Risk.

Frequency: Always (occurs upon every admin update).

Consequences: * Severe data leak and permission escalation risks (agent acting on outdated rules).

Increased vulnerability to prompt injection.

Substantial manual overhead (users must manually "wake up" the agent's memory).

Evidence/examples

In our real-world testing, when a database connection error occurs, the agent gets stuck in a retry loop within a specific user's chat. Even if an admin corrects the procedure in a separate session and updates the training diary, the looping session remains isolated. The agent will never break the loop or check the updated rules unless the user manually intervenes and orders it to "read the logs".

Additional information

Prefix injection into the User Message is a proven, lightweight strategy in many enterprise-grade LLM gateways for enforcing hard constraints. It prevents the model from ignoring critical boundaries and requires minimal development effort to implement.