Problem

LLM responses frequently start with newlines or whitespace characters. On WhatsApp, this results in ugly empty space at the top of message bubbles — making the conversation look broken or poorly formatted.

Root Cause

There is no trimStart() (or equivalent) anywhere in the outbound delivery pipeline. Whatever the model returns is sent verbatim, including any leading \n, \r\n, or spaces.

Affected Delivery Paths

Three separate code paths send text to WhatsApp, and all three are affected:

1. dist/web/auto-reply/deliver-reply.js — the main auto-reply path (~90% of outbound messages)
2. dist/infra/outbound/deliver.js → sendTextChunks — general outbound delivery for all channels
3. dist/channels/plugins/outbound/whatsapp.js → sendText + sendMedia (caption) — the message tool / programmatic send path

Suggested Fix

Add a single line in each path, before the text is sent:

text = text.replace(/^\s+/, "");
// or: text = text.trimStart();

This strips only leading whitespace — trailing whitespace is left intact (harmless on WhatsApp).

Specific locations

Notes

• We have been running this as a manual patch on our installation successfully — no side effects observed.
• The fix is trivial (4 one-line additions) but has a big impact on message presentation quality.
• Ideally this would be applied in the source (src/) so it survives npm update.