Boxmining v2

Tag: sub-agents

  • OpenClaw 2.23 Update: 1 Million Token Context, Model Freedom, and More

    OpenClaw 2.23 Update: 1 Million Token Context, Model Freedom, and More

    OpenClaw just dropped version 2.23, and honestly, this one’s packed. We’re getting updates almost daily at this point, but I know you’re busy — so let me break down the features that actually matter and what they mean for your AI agent setup.

    The Big One: 1 Million Token Context Window

    Let’s start with the headline feature — a 1 million token context window, now available in beta for Claude Opus and Sonnet. This is massive. To put it in perspective, that’s roughly five times larger than previous context limits, and you could fit about a quarter of the entire Harry Potter series in a single conversation.

    Why does this matter? One of the biggest reasons your AI agent sometimes feels “dumb” is context overflow. Every conversation you have with your agent sends the entire chat history along with it. When that history exceeds the context window, the agent starts forgetting things — earlier instructions, preferences, important details. It’s not that the AI got stupider; it literally ran out of memory.

    With 1 million tokens, your agent can hold an entire day’s worth of back-and-forth without needing to restart or losing track of what you discussed that morning. If you’re using your agent daily for scheduling, research, or project management, this is a game-changer. The catch? It’s expensive. Running Opus with a full 1 million context window will cost significantly more than shorter conversations.

    Model Freedom: Save Money Without Sacrificing Quality

    This is where things get practical. OpenClaw 2.23 makes it easier than ever to switch between AI models on the fly. The idea is simple: not every task needs the most powerful (and expensive) model.

    Need to build a quick dashboard or generate a simple script? Send it to MiniMax or Kimi — they’re fast and cheap. Need deep reasoning, complex scheduling, or life-planning tasks like booking restaurant reservations? Keep that on Opus, where the extra intelligence actually matters.

    Speaking of which, Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 4.6, which approaches Opus-level intelligence at roughly half the cost and twice the speed. It’s already available on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot. For most everyday agent tasks, Sonnet 4.6 is probably the sweet spot between performance and cost.

    Sub-Agent Orchestration: Let Your Agent Be the Boss

    Sub-agent orchestration isn’t technically new in OpenClaw, but 2.23 refines it further. The concept is straightforward: instead of you managing multiple AI agents individually, you designate one agent as the coordinator. That coordinator spins up sub-agents for parallel tasks, collects the results, and reports back to you.

    Here’s a tip that came up in our discussion: be explicit with your agent. Tell it “you are the orchestrator, you command the sub-agents, I don’t want to interact with them directly.” Early on, one of our partners was manually talking to eight different agents individually — that’s doing it the hard way. Let the coordinator handle delegation. You just talk to one agent.

    This pattern is especially powerful for research workflows. Your main agent can spin up multiple research bots simultaneously, each investigating a different angle, then synthesize everything into a single report.

    Video Understanding: Cool But Expensive

    OpenClaw now supports video understanding through Moonshot integration. Your agent can literally watch videos and process visual content. Before you get too excited though — this is still in the “cool but impractical for daily use” category.

    The computational cost of processing video is significant. We’re not at the point where your agent can binge-watch Netflix and write you a sequel. It’s more suited for specific use cases where you need an AI to analyze video content for work purposes. We’ll be doing a deeper dive on Kimi Vision in an upcoming video.

    Security Hardening and Cron Job Fixes

    On the security front, the advice remains the same: use a VPS. The way we’ve always recommended installing OpenClaw — on a separate virtual private server rather than your main machine — is still the safest approach. Don’t let your agent access every aspect of your life just yet.

    Cron jobs got some attention too. These are your scheduled tasks — daily news briefings, morning presentations, automated reports. They’ve been a bit unreliable for some users, particularly when old cron jobs pile up and try to execute simultaneously. The fix? Clean up your old cron jobs first, and consider having your agent build a dashboard to track all scheduled tasks. That way you can verify everything is running on schedule. Don’t trust, verify.

    OpenClaw’s Future: Foundation Model

    One important piece of context: OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger announced on February 14 that he’s joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw itself is transitioning to an independent open-source foundation, with OpenAI’s continued support. So despite the leadership change, the project remains open-source and actively developed — as evidenced by the rapid pace of updates we’re seeing.

    How to Update

    Updating is dead simple. Just tell your agent: “Hey, update yourself to the latest OpenClaw.” That’s it. Works about 95% of the time. The other 5%? Well, as we like to say — when you’re using AI, you’re playing casino. But we have tutorials for when things go sideways, so don’t worry.

    The Bottom Line

    OpenClaw 2.23 is a solid update. The 1 million token context window is the standout feature for power users, while model freedom is the real money-saver for everyone else. Sub-agent orchestration continues to mature, and the security and cron improvements address real pain points.

    If you’re running OpenClaw, update now. If you’re not, check out our setup guide to get started. And if you want to see more content like this, join our community over at BoxminingAI and drop a comment — our bot actually reads all of them now.

  • NEW OpenClaw Update is MASSIVE — Here’s What Changed in v2.25

    NEW OpenClaw Update is MASSIVE — Here’s What Changed in v2.25

    OpenClaw just dropped version 2.25, and honestly, this one’s a big deal. I’ve been testing it hands-on and there are some genuinely useful improvements here — especially around sub-agents and visibility. Let me break down what’s new and what it actually means for your day-to-day usage.

    Sub-Agent Delivery Gets a Major Overhaul

    The headline feature in v2.25 is the overhauled sub-agent delivery system. If you’ve been using OpenClaw for a while, you know sub-agents are one of the most powerful features — they let your main agent spin up smaller, focused agents to handle specific tasks in parallel. The problem was, they could be unreliable. Sub-agents would sometimes time out, vanish into the void, and you’d never hear about it again.

    I’ve experienced this firsthand. You tell your agent to do something, it says “give me five minutes,” spawns a sub-agent, and then… nothing. You’re sitting there going “yo, where’s my stuff?” with no feedback whatsoever.

    That changes with this update. Sub-agents now actively report back their status. When a sub-agent completes its work, the system tells you. When it fails or times out, you get notified about that too. It’s a visibility upgrade that makes the whole orchestration system feel way more functional and trustworthy.

    Why Sub-Agents Matter (And Why You Should Use Them)

    Here’s the thing about sub-agents that people sometimes miss: they’re not just about parallelism. They’re about clean context. Your main agent — the one you’ve been working with daily — has its brain full of everything: crypto updates, project notes, random conversations. When you spin up a sub-agent, it gets a fresh, focused context window dedicated entirely to one task.

    This is why sub-agents consistently produce better results for specific tasks like research, writing presentations, or updating documentation. The sub-agent isn’t distracted by the 47 other things your main agent has been juggling.

    With v2.25, the release notes confirm over 40 documented changes spanning Android client improvements, WebSocket authentication tightening, model fallback logic refinements, and comprehensive vulnerability patches. The sub-agent improvements are part of a broader push to make the entire agent orchestration pipeline more reliable and transparent.

    Real-World Testing: Building a Presentation

    To put this update through its paces, we built a presentation about the new features using OpenClaw itself. The agent automatically spun up sub-agents to research what changed in v2.25, pull community reactions from X, and then compile everything into slides.

    Did it work perfectly? Not quite. During one task, the sub-agent left a file truncated — cut off midway through. But here’s where the improvement shows: the main agent caught it, flagged the issue, and said “let me handle this myself.” That kind of self-awareness and error recovery is exactly what was missing before.

    We also experimented with breaking down large tasks into multiple specialized sub-agents — one for research, one for writing, one for quality-checking the output. This modular approach is something I’d recommend trying. It plays to the strengths of the sub-agent system and reduces the chance of any single agent getting overwhelmed.

    Heartbeat DM Delivery

    The other key improvement is heartbeat DM delivery. If you’ve set up heartbeat checks — where your agent periodically pings you to confirm it’s alive and working — the delivery mechanism is now more reliable. Previously, heartbeat messages could get lost or delayed, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a health check system.

    OpenClaw’s heartbeat system lets you configure check-in intervals (commonly every 5-30 minutes) with custom checklists your agent runs through. The v2.25 update also introduces a directPolicy configuration option, giving you more control over how heartbeat DMs are handled.

    Cron Job Tracking Gets Smarter

    Another pain point that’s been addressed: cron jobs. Before this update, if a scheduled task failed, you often had no idea why. Did it run at the wrong time because of timezone mismatches on your VPS? Did it silently crash? The new version adds better tracking and cleanup for cron jobs, so you can actually see what happened and why.

    The release also includes improvements to session maintenance with openclaw sessions cleanup, per-agent store targeting, and disk-budget controls — all of which help keep your instance running smoothly over time.

    What Else Is New

    Beyond the big features, v2.25 packs in a bunch of other updates worth noting:

    • Android updates — new features for mobile users (though I haven’t tested these personally since I’m not on Android)
    • Gateway security hardening — including optional Strict-Transport-Security headers for direct HTTPS deployments
    • Communication improvements — better visibility across Telegram and Discord integrations
    • Kimmy Vision — video content understanding via Moonshot, which is a feature I’m excited to explore in a future video

    One thing that really stands out is the pace of development. OpenClaw has a strong community of contributors pushing updates almost daily. Despite concerns after Peter Steinberg joined OpenAI (which is famously closed-source), the project remains actively open-source with lots of people building on it. That’s genuinely encouraging for the long-term health of the platform.

    Should You Update?

    Absolutely. If you’re running OpenClaw, updating is as simple as telling your agent to do it — literally just say “update yourself.” The sub-agent improvements alone make this worth it, especially if you’re doing any kind of multi-step automation. The better visibility into what your agents are actually doing removes a lot of the guesswork that made previous versions frustrating at times.

    The AI models themselves haven’t changed — you’re still running whatever you had before (Claude Opus 4.6, MiniMax, etc.). What’s improved is the plumbing: how agents communicate, how tasks get delegated, and how failures get reported. And honestly, that’s exactly the kind of update that makes the biggest difference in daily use.