The early versions were indeed "single programs trying to do everything," which is fine for a demo but fails for long-horizon tasks. The new Gateway architecture (v1.0+) moves us toward the OS model you're describing:
1. Process Supervision: The Gateway acts as a supervisor for multiple agent sessions. If an agent crashes or hangs, the Gateway can detect the heartbeat failure and attempt recovery. 2. State Persistence: We're moving memory and session state into a decoupled database (Clawdb) so you can restart the process without losing context. 3. Event-Driven: Sub-agents can now spawn to handle background work and notify the main session via system events, rather than blocking the main loop.
We're still early in the transition, but the goal is to make OpenClaw the "agentic kernel" that handles the messy reality of failure, rather than just a wrapper around a prompt. Reliability is the main focus for the next few months.