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.
Michael Gu
Michael Gu, Creator of Boxmining, stared in the Blockchain space as a Bitcoin miner in 2012. Something he immediately noticed was that accurate information is hard to come by in this space. He started Boxmining in 2017 mainly as a passion project, to educate people on digital assets and share his experiences. Being based in Asia, Michael also found a huge discrepancy between digital asset trends and knowledge gap in the West and China.