Field Learnings with OpenClaw and WhatsApp

Technical notes extracted by Claude from deploying an agentic WhatsApp bot to production (OpenClaw 2026.4.23). Focus on things not in the official docs or that cost hours of debugging. High-Level Architecture OpenClaw is a self-hosted agentic gateway that routes messages between: Channels (WhatsApp via Baileys, Slack, Discord, Telegram, etc). Agents (isolated objects with workspace, persona, model). Tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol — standard protocol). The main process is the gateway (Node