Turn off thinking in cron jobs that need to send digests

A developer fixed an OpenClaw cron setup so its article digest actually reached Telegram.

Done with OpenClawยท Intermediate

What they did
They had a cron job that checked RSS feeds, picked articles, and drafted a digest, then a second agent that forwarded the digest to Telegram. When thinking mode was left on, the model kept the work inside its hidden reasoning area, so the digest text stayed empty and the send step had nothing to deliver. They changed the heartbeat config to disable thinking, used DeepSeek Chat for the heartbeat and cron model, and added separate sessions.
How it went
With thinking on, the job averaged 88 seconds and failed to send anything across five tests. After the change, it finished in 30 seconds and sent six articles to Telegram on the first try.
Tips
If a job reports delivered:true, verify the message in Telegram because that status only means the announce step ran cleanly. The daily digest cost about $0.03 per day on OpenRouter.

Try it yourself with OpenClaw

I have an [OpenClaw] cron job that scans [RSS feeds], selects [article digests], and sends them to [Telegram] at [time]. It runs, but nothing shows up where it should. Inspect the cron and announce setup, check logs for why the outgoing digest is empty, and try disabling thinking mode if that is the problem. Pause before changing any other jobs or making any irreversible changes, then run the job once and confirm the digest appears in Telegram.

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Read the original on blog.rezvov.com โ†—

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