OpenClaw Signals: CLI Telemetry Hooks, Manifest Validation Tightening, and the Graceful Degradation Debate

Tools

CLI Telemetry Hooks for Plugin Lifecycle Events

This PR wires opt-in telemetry into the CLI so you can actually see which plugin lifecycle events fire during dev and deploy. For anyone building automation around OpenClaw, this is the missing feedback loop you need to debug flaky pipelines without guessing.

Improved Error Context in Task Rejection Handlers

Rejection handlers now carry richer metadata about why a task was rejected, including upstream dependency status. If you're writing retry logic, this gives you the signal you need to distinguish transient failures from permanent ones without extra instrumentation.

Analysis

Manifest Validation Tightening to Catch Malformed Plugin Configs

The issue proposes stricter schema checks on plugin manifests at load time instead of failing silently downstream. This matters because half the runtime errors people hit are really config typos that should have been caught five seconds earlier.

News

Graceful Degradation Mode for Non-Critical Plugin Failures

This PR introduces a degraded mode where non-critical plugins can fail without taking down the whole task graph. It's a meaningful shift toward treating plugin reliability as a spectrum rather than a binary, which changes how you architect fallback strategies.