Sport Mode

Temporarily boost heartbeat frequency (default 3m) and inject a monitoring task into HEARTBEAT.md. Perfect for supervising background agents (Codex), long-running builds, or interactive games.

Usage

# Turn ON: Set heartbeat to 3m and set monitoring task
sport-mode on --task "Check Codex progress. If done, run sport-mode off."

# Custom Interval: Set to 1 minute
sport-mode on --task "Game tick" --every "1m"

# Turn OFF: Reset heartbeat to 30m and clear HEARTBEAT.md
sport-mode off

How it works

• ON:
• Patches ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json (hot-reload) to set heartbeat.every.
• Writes your task to HEARTBEAT.md with a "Sport Mode Active" header.
• OFF:
• Patches config back to 30m (default).
• Clears HEARTBEAT.md.

Best Practices

1. Set a Finish Line

• ✅ Good: "Monitor build. If success or fail, run sport-mode off."
• ❌ Bad: "Monitor build." (Agent might keep reporting "Done" forever until you manually stop it).

2. State Machine in File

• Pattern: Read state -> Execute step -> Write new state -> Sleep.
• This keeps the agent "stateless" (doesn't rely on conversation history context window) but the task "stateful".

3. Use tmux for Visibility

• The agent can inspect the pane (tmux capture-pane) without interfering.
• The user can attach (tmux attach) to watch live.

4. Silence is Golden

• Configure the agent to reply HEARTBEAT_OK (silence) if the status hasn't changed.
• Only notify the user on milestone completion, errors, or final success.

Implementation Note