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Helper Not Responding

What to check when your helper stops replying, starting with the most common cause that is not a bug.

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First: it is probably asleep, and that is fine

Idle helpers sleep. It is the top reason a helper “stops responding,” and it is by design, not a failure.

What you can rely on while a helper sleeps:

  • Inbound email is never dropped. A message to the helper’s managed mailbox is stored durably, queues a wake, and gets handled once the helper is back up.
  • Opening the Helper page wakes it. Go to Helper in the sidebar. You will see “Waking — usually 10–40 seconds.” Other dashboard pages deliberately do not wake it.
  • Your Inbox keeps working. Reviewing, editing, approving, and declining drafts in Inbox does not require a running helper.

So before anything else: open the Helper page, wait up to a minute, and try again.

Check the status on the Helper page

The status card tells you which situation you are in:

  • Sleeping: normal. Opening the page wakes it.
  • “Queued — waiting for capacity. We’ll start your agent automatically.”: the start is saved and will happen on its own. No action needed.
  • “Waking — usually 10–40 seconds.”: wait a moment.
  • Stopped (you clicked Stop): a helper you stopped stays stopped. Click Start.
  • A billing or trial prompt instead of a status: an expired trial or billing issue blocks starting. See Plans & Pricing.

Check the Work Ledger

Open Work Ledger in the sidebar. The “Work record” tab shows the helper’s recent work in plain language; the “Technical activity” tab shows the detailed event feed, including errors from API calls or configuration problems. This is the fastest way to see what actually happened, and it works even while the helper is stopped.

Check your API key

A helper cannot generate replies without a working model key.

  1. Go to Helper in the sidebar and open the API Keys tab.
  2. Look for a trial-usage banner. New workspaces run on a BrainRoad trial key; when it runs low or runs out, the dashboard says so.
  3. If you added your own key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, xAI, or another supported provider), confirm it is still valid. Keys get revoked, rotated, or hit quota limits at the provider’s end. Check the key’s status in the provider’s own dashboard.

Restart the helper

If the helper shows as running but is not replying, restart it: click Stop on the Helper page, wait for the shutdown to finish, then click Start. This clears stuck sessions and state inside the helper’s workspace.

If a specific channel went quiet

Chat channels such as Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, or Signal are features of the helper runtime itself (OpenClaw or Hermes), configured inside the runtime’s own channel screens with your own bot token or account credentials. If the helper replies by email but not on a channel:

  1. Open the runtime’s channel settings from the dashboard and check the connection status there.
  2. Reconnect or re-authenticate with your provider credentials if the session dropped. Some channels (for example WhatsApp) use sessions that expire and need re-linking.
  3. A helper with a connected live channel is kept running rather than put to sleep, so a quiet channel usually means the channel session dropped, not that the helper slept.

Note that a reply the helper drafts for the outside world still goes through your Inbox for review before it is sent, unless you have granted narrow earned autonomy for that thread. If you are waiting for a customer to receive something, check whether a draft is sitting in the Inbox waiting for your approval. See How Review Works.

Check the provider’s status page

AI model providers have outages. If the helper is running, the key is valid, and the Work Ledger shows API errors, check the provider’s status page (for example status.anthropic.com or status.openai.com) to rule out an upstream problem.