OpenClaw says its migrator can miss legacy exec rules

• OpenClaw’s latest update pushes users toward the web interface and native apps, according to steipete’s reply about the new surfaces.
• The project rewrote roughly half of OpenClaw in two months, steipete said, as it rebuilt the product rather than asking existing users to start over.
• The team now builds through a shared agent that tracks work across contributors, steipete’s internal-workflow post says, with runs available on connected machines or roughly 80 cloud providers, per steipete.
• One reported upgrade miss involved legacy exec rules, as steipete’s support reply acknowledged, even while private sessions and web-created Full Access sessions remain available in the new workflow.

The official announcement puts the scale at 933 contributors, 569 first-time contributors and more than 16,000 pull requests. The release notes contain the more consequential migration detail: sessions and transcripts now live in SQLite, and sessions created after that move do not appear in an older file-backed build.

Graphical setup on Mac, Linux and Windows now hands people directly to the browser, which the release notes position as both the first conversation and a place to return to live work.

Steipete called the new interface “all OpenClaw” in a reply about the web UI. He also said he does not use bots on Twitter in a separate reply.

The project’s own development process is the clearest demo of the intended shift: steipete said the team moved from individual local coding harnesses to a shared agent that knows what everyone is doing and orchestrates work.

• A team can deploy one gateway, see each other’s sessions, use any model and provider, then begin in Slack and continue on web or phone, steipete said in a reply.
• Session privacy has its own mode, steipete said.
• While troubleshooting Codex auto-review, steipete asked about creating a Full Access web session.
• Runs can execute on the gateway, a connected machine on any OS, or about 80 cloud providers; steipete said Auto can load-balance across them.

The replies read like an active support queue. Steipete said he would improve the updater after a user’s updater report.

He also said the release was receiving “lots of love,” without putting a number on adoption or usage in that release-day reply.

One support report found that the migrator missed old exec rules. Steipete said it was the only such report he had seen at that point and asked the tester for details in the migration reply.

The code-level failure is narrower in the project’s fix PR: an upgrade from 2026.7.1-2 to 2026.8.1 could leave the Gateway unavailable when an earlier install had written exec-approvals.json.

• The new release put a fail-closed gate around the canonical SQLite approvals store.
• Doctor’s security checks and generated-rule cleanup could hit that gate before Doctor completed its JSON-to-SQLite import.
• The repair changes that ordering so the legacy approval state can be imported first.

Steipete’s configuration reply adds why the upgrade has a long tail: the release reduced roughly 10,000 configuration options to fewer than 8,000, but he said every variant cannot be tested. A later follow-up told the reporting user that the problem had been fixed and linked a Doctor patch.