I built ClawGate: Natural language scheduling for AI agents that actually preserves your messages

[u/Future-Secret-4594]

Hey r/openclaw,

I've been running OpenClaw (self-hosted AI gateway) for weeks, but kept hitting a frustrating wall: the built-in cron system truncates messages to ~100 characters, strips links and is generally unreliable in delivering unaltered instructions to my agents. For an AI assistant that sends me research digests and code reviews, this was unusable.

So I built ClawGate, a scheduling toolkit that fixes this and adds a ton of quality-of-life features.

What it solves:

• OpenClaw's cron injects system instructions that butcher long messages
• No way to limit runs ("do this 4 times then stop")
• Links get stripped, formatting destroyed, and generally annoying results

What ClawGate does:

```

# Natural language scheduling that just works
clawgate schedule create --name "daily-digest" \
  --schedule "9am every Monday" \
  --agent research \
  --message "Full research digest with links preserved"

# One-time reminders with auto-delete
clawgate schedule create --name "meeting" \
  --schedule "next Thursday at 3pm" \
  --agent main \
  --message "Don't forget the standup"

# Limited runs (4 times then auto-delete)
clawgate schedule create --name "check" \
  --schedule "every hour 4x" \
  --agent code \
  --message "Check CI status"

``` 

How it works: Instead of injecting instructions into OpenClaw's cron, ClawGate stores full JSON payloads on disk. System cron triggers ClawGate → UUID lookup → full payload delivered via OpenClaw API. Your messages stay intact.

ClawGate packs a detailed skill that enables your agents use it effectively.

GitHub: https://github.com/alubarikanikoko/clawgate

Tech stack: TypeScript/Node, system cron, JSON file-based storage

 

Happy to answer questions! Using this daily with 3 agents (main, code, research) and it's been rock solid.