OpenClaw merged another P1 maintenance fix shortly after the nightly scan cutoff: PR #94478, "fix(doctor): repair legacy Codex route persistence". It closes issue #94184 and tightens how openclaw doctor --fix repairs older Codex model routing config.
The fix keeps openai-codex/* as a migration-only route. After repair, stale upgraded Codex model-map config is persisted under canonical openai/* model keys, while the repaired model remains pinned to Codex runtime policy.
That distinction matters for users who upgraded through older Codex routing conventions. The old route should not continue acting like a live provider or catalog path, but users also should not lose authored model parameters during repair.
What Doctor Repairs Now
The PR says Doctor now proves several behaviors in the upgrade path:
- Stale
openai-codex/*defaults are rewritten as canonicalopenai/* - Authored model parameters are preserved
- The stale
openai-codex/*model-map key is removed on write - The repaired model is pinned to
agentRuntime.id = "codex"
In the test proof, a temporary config started with agents.defaults.model = "openai-codex/gpt-5.5" and a model-map entry carrying reasoning_effort = "high". After pnpm openclaw doctor --fix --non-interactive --yes, the persisted config used openai/gpt-5.5, preserved reasoning_effort, removed the stale model-map key, and kept Codex enabled.
Why This Is User-Facing
Config migrations often look boring until they break someone who has been upgrading a real installation for months. OpenClaw's Codex integration has moved quickly, and stale provider-style route names can become confusing if they survive as writable configuration.
The important part of this fix is that it avoids two bad outcomes at once. It does not keep openai-codex/* alive as a normal model route, and it does not flatten the user's intended Codex model parameters during cleanup.
For operators, that means doctor --fix should be safer to run on older homes. It can normalize the route while preserving the settings that were actually meaningful.
The Proof Path
The PR includes a concrete behavior proof from a local OpenClaw checkout on the branch, using OpenClaw 2026.6.8 on macOS arm64 with isolated temporary OPENCLAW_HOME, OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR, and OPENCLAW_CONFIG_PATH.
The reported result includes:
doctorCompleted: true- A route repair message observed
defaultModel: "openai/gpt-5.5"- No stale model-map key
- Preserved
reasoning_effort: "high" agentRuntime.id: "codex"
The PR explicitly notes that it does not test live Codex OAuth or app-server network inference. The proof is scoped to the doctor upgrade-persistence path, which is the right boundary for this change.
Bottom Line
PR #94478 is a good example of OpenClaw hardening the upgrade experience, not just the happy path for fresh installs. If your OpenClaw home has older Codex model config, this is the kind of doctor repair that should make future releases feel less surprising.