OpenClaw Troubleshooting: 'No Reply from Agent,' WORKFLOW_AUTO.md, and Silent Delivery Failures

After deploying OpenClaw and documenting 16 incidents in one day , I kept getting questions about specific errors. This post collects the fixes in one place. No narrative, just diagnostics. "No reply from agent" Symptom The announce agent completes in under one second (typically 500-600ms) and returns an empty response. Logs show: [announce] completed in 557ms [announce] result: no reply from agent The cron job runs, the summary field exists, but nothing reaches Telegram. Root cause The announce agent is a separate LLM call that receives the cron job's summary as input. When that summary is empty or contains only a preamble ("Let me execute the digest task..."), the announce model has nothing to forward. It finishes instantly because there's no real work to do. The problem is upstream. The cron agent produced garbage output, and the announce agent correctly identified it as not worth sending. Why the cron agent produces empty output In most cases: thinking mode. OpenClaw auto-enables t