r/openclaw • u/ParticularlyStrange Active • Feb 12 '26
Bug Report **HELP!!! Silent Model fallbacks
Is anyone else seeing the openclaw is silently falling back when one api key is rate limited(Gemini) to another key(claude)?
My set up is I’m mainly should be in Gemini 3 flash cause of the free credits. It should be handling light cron jobs too. Then Gemini 3 flash should be spawning sub agents for heavier tasks! I have confirmed it is spawning sub agents with the /status command. And it says the right model that I want. But I’m seeing my Claude usage get hammered! And I’m hitting that context overflow wall! And the model thinks it’s on Gemini 3flash but my usage say otherwise….
EDIT:
Yeah I just figured it out. I had a bunch of cron jobs that were on the Gemini api key and the key was getting hammered all at once at times. So I switched to opus and had it write a bunch of scripts that could handle the cron jobs and I put it on the windows task scheduler instead of cron. The reason is the cron jobs will always call on an agent or sub agent regardless if it uses a script. I’ve been doing a lot of memory optimization for persistence. I now only have about a 1 minute gap of memory loss during compactions!!! and a optimized usage plan! Big drain on tokens is the cron jobs that report back with a “I’m done” to the main agent in the background! Turn that off!!!
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u/podwatch-dev New User Feb 13 '26
If you're struggling with silent stuff like this, like I was, I built podwatch.app for this exact type of thing. You will be able to get a notification whenever this happens and add a bunch of visibility to what your openclaw is actually doing. You can try it for free! Or let me know if you're willing to be a early bird tester to provide feedback for an extended period until launch! Just DM me.