OpenClaw merged a major Control UI and Gateway reliability fix this morning: PR #121200, "fix(ui): make Cloud Worker startup responsive". It targets a frustrating startup path where a user could create a Cloud Worker session and then sit on an inert /new page while provisioning continued somewhere out of sight.
The PR also fixes a related model-catalog issue where selecting GPT-5.6 High could be rejected after ChatGPT catalog discovery admitted Platform-only alias rows with the wrong reasoning metadata.
What Changed
Before this patch, NewSessionPage owned too much of the Cloud Worker startup lifecycle at once: durable session creation, worker dispatch, provisioning, sync, startup, first send, and navigation. If anything was slow or failed, the user could be left without a durable destination or visible progress.
The new design gives the application-lifetime Cloud startup coordinator ownership after durable session creation. The page navigates immediately into the created session, then Gateway-owned placement transitions show up as canonical progress states.
The PR body names those phases directly:
- Requested
- Provisioning
- Syncing
- Starting
- Sending
The initial prompt is preserved and sent once after active worker ownership is established. Recovery records are persisted per canonical session key, so reconnects and stale-client takeovers do not cancel or delete unrelated session work.
Why It Matters
Cloud Workers are supposed to make heavyweight or remote work feel manageable from the Control UI. A frozen route does the opposite. It makes the user wonder whether a session exists, whether the prompt survived, and whether retrying will create duplicate work.
Moving progress into the created session gives the user a visible anchor. It also aligns with the way durable agents should behave: session state belongs to the session, not to the temporary page that launched it.
The model-catalog fix is smaller but still useful. Platform-only bare gpt-5.6 and chat-latest rows are now filtered out of the ChatGPT catalog, preserving valid ChatGPT metadata for models that actually support High reasoning.
Verification
This was not a small UI tweak. The PR reports broad focused coverage across Control UI, Gateway, and OpenAI paths, including:
- 89 final per-session durability and reconnect tests
- 8 Cloud browser E2E tests
- 9 browser E2E tests for Cloud startup and failure flows
- 302 focused tests across affected paths
- A passing production build
- A clean final P1-level Codex autoreview
The evidence section also notes source-blind behavior validation for immediate routing, visible placement phases, send-after-active ownership, stable idempotency, exactly one prompt, route survival, and visible failure.
Bottom Line
PR #121200 turns Cloud Worker startup from a route-bound wait into a session-owned workflow. Users should get a created chat route quickly, see meaningful provisioning progress, and avoid duplicate or lost startup sends when reconnects happen.