🚀 clawdbot 2026.1.22: A Major Step Forward in Stability and Integration
The clawdbot team is excited to announce version 2026.1.22, a comprehensive release that addresses critical infrastructure challenges while expanding platform capabilities. This update focuses on robustness, intelligent resource management, and seamless multi-platform communication.
✨ Headline Features
Adaptive Compaction Safeguard
One of the most significant improvements in this release is the enhanced compaction safeguard mechanism. The system now employs adaptive chunking, progressive fallback strategies, and UI status monitoring with automatic retries. This intelligent approach ensures that data compaction operations complete reliably, even under challenging conditions, while keeping users informed every step of the way.
Intelligent Chat Threading
Slack users will appreciate the new replyToModeByChatType feature, which enables chat-type-specific reply threading overrides. This means conversations flow more naturally across different chat contexts, reducing confusion and improving message organization.
Enhanced Media Support
BlueBubbles integration has been significantly strengthened with asVoice support for MP3 and CAF voice memos in attachment sending. Additionally, the typing indicator now intelligently stops on idle or when no reply is expected, creating a more natural messaging experience.
Improved Onboarding Experience
New users now benefit from an enhanced onboarding flow featuring hatch choice selection (TUI/Web/Later), comprehensive token explanations, background dashboard seeding on macOS, and convenient showcase links to get started quickly.
🔧 Platform Enhancements
Provider Integrations
Antigravity usage tracking has been added to status output, giving users better visibility into their resource consumption. The Discord integration now includes clearer Message Content Intent onboarding hints, reducing setup friction.
Mattermost plugin improvements include enforced pairing and allowlist gating, preserved @username targets, and clarified plugin-only documentation. The Matrix plugin now persists m.direct for resolved DMs and includes hardened room fallback mechanisms.
Gateway and Service Management
The gateway service now properly stops before uninstalling and fails gracefully if it remains loaded. This prevents orphaned processes and ensures clean upgrades.
🐛 Critical Fixes and Improvements
Message Handling
The message tool now correctly preserves path and filePath as-is for send operations, while only hydrating buffers for sendAttachment. This distinction prevents unnecessary data transformation and improves performance.
Agent Intelligence
Agents have received multiple refinements:
- Transcript sanitization is now centralized in the runner, keeping
<final>tags and error turns intact for better debugging - Tool summaries are more readable, with optional parameters displayed only when set
- SOUL.md guidance is honored even when files are nested or path-qualified
- OpenAI sessions now use image-sanitization-only mode with provider-gated tool-id and repair sanitization
- Concrete API error details are surfaced instead of generic AI service errors, enabling faster troubleshooting
Authentication and Security
Authentication profiles are now skipped during cooldown in initial selection and rotation. Both agents and TUI honor user-pinned auth profiles during cooldown while preserving search picker ranking. The Doctor utility now properly honors CLAWDBOT_GATEWAY_TOKEN for auth checks and security audit token reuse.
Execution and Permissions
The exec system now falls back to non-PTY mode when PTY spawn fails (EBADF), ensuring commands execute reliably. Exec approvals have been enhanced with per-segment allowlists for chained shell commands on gateway and node hosts, providing granular security control.
UI and Display
Control UI now correctly resolves local avatar URLs with basePath across injection and identity RPC. The CLI prefers ~ for home paths in output, making logs more readable. macOS gateway summaries now prefer linked channels to avoid false "not linked" status reports.
Communication Platforms
Slack improvements include reduced WebClient retries to prevent duplicate sends and support for reading thread replies when threadId is provided (replies-only mode). BlueBubbles typing indicators now stop appropriately on idle or when no reply is expected.
Auto-Reply and Session Management
Auto-reply now only reports a model switch when session state is available, preventing spurious notifications. This creates a cleaner user experience during session transitions.
📦 Technical Improvements
This release includes numerous under-the-hood improvements:
- Enhanced error handling and fallback mechanisms
- Improved resource management and cleanup
- Better documentation and configuration examples
- Refined permission and allowlist systems
- More robust gateway and service lifecycle management
🎉 Community Contributions
This release would not have been possible without contributions from the community. Special thanks to @dlauer, @patelhiren, @stefangalescu, @Nicell, @hopyky, @robbyczgw-cla, @zerone0x, @kyleok, @czekaj, @azade-c, @neooriginal, @sibbl, @damoahdominic, @odrobnik, @tobiasbischoff, @rodrigouroz, and all other contributors who helped make clawdbot more reliable and feature-rich.
🚀 What's Next?
With this release, clawdbot continues its trajectory toward becoming the most robust and user-friendly platform integration tool. The focus on adaptive systems, intelligent fallbacks, and comprehensive error handling sets the stage for even more ambitious features in future releases.
Upgrade to clawdbot 2026.1.22 today and experience improved stability, better multi-platform support, and a more intuitive user experience.