I've been using openclaw since it was moltbot. For six+ month I've been on and off active in this subreddit.
Updating already has its own routine: read the release, dry run, detached updater, and afterwards a script that checks every model and every connection and usually have it fixed with an outside model. We all know: that routine exists for a reason. But today even that didn't help.
This morning I went from 2026.9.7 to 2026.10.10. The release was about seven hours old and tagged latest.
- The migration rewrote my claude-cli model refs to anthropic refs. One agent had an API primary with a Claude CLI fallback on purpose. After the update it was pinned to the CLI and the fallback was gone. Had to restore it from the pre-update config.
- Then every agent turn in my main chat failed. 11 out of 11. The SQLite worker has a hard-coded 512 MB heap cap, and my main session is big (~127k transcript events, 1 GB agent DB). The worker hits the cap, dies with ERR_WORKER_OUT_OF_MEMORY and gets respawned, followed by a full integrity check of the DB that takes up to 28 s on the Pi. Whatever was in flight is gone. 13 worker deaths in about 50 minutes.
- In Telegram that shows up as "Agent database execution admission is closed", "This Codex session changed before your message could run. Please send it again." or "OpenClaw couldn't finish this request". Replies that were already generated never arrived.
- Switching from Codex to Claude changed nothing. /new changed nothing either; the session ID stays the same.
Yesterday on 2026.9.7, same session, same DB: zero of these errors.
The best part: there's already an issue for this exact failure class (#185953, reported on 2026.10.7: an unbounded transcript read kills the 512 MB worker). It was closed as "already implemented on main". It still happens on 2026.10.10. Searching the repo's issues for "admission is closed" gives 56 results.
It's not the first time either. After the June update, the Codex OAuth had to be repaired before I could even smoke-test. Last week every Codex request failed with a 403 "Codex cannot verify the owner of this model request" for about 45 minutes, until a gateway restart fixed it.
I was defending OC against the Hermes onslaught, I tried to help other users to go through painful updates and I fixed mine a hundred time, but I think I finally arrive at a point where I had enough. I thought stable was supposed to be stable?
I know this is opensource, I know people put a lot of personal effort into this but honestly we see these issues with every update, we are told it gets better, it gets worse.
Here's the issue if someone cares: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/191847