Best possible solution:

Land the narrow cron timer fix after adding changelog credit and letting exact-head CI complete, while leaving broader recurring retry policy work to the existing separate retry issues.

Do we have a high-confidence way to reproduce the issue?

Yes. Current main has a high-confidence source-level reproduction: run a recurring main-session wakeMode: "now" cron job with runHeartbeatOnce returning requests-in-flight, and it enters the recurring fast-exit branch that records ok after one deferred wake.

Is this the best way to solve the issue?

Yes for the runtime behavior. The PR uses the narrow maintainable boundary: retry temporary requests-in-flight and lanes-busy skips through the existing bounded wait while preserving the cron-in-progress deferred wake path.

Full review comments:

• [P3] Credit the known contributors in the changelog — CHANGELOG.md:36
  OpenClaw changelog policy asks user-facing contributor entries to include a human Thanks @... attribution when the credited people are known. This new fix entry has no attribution even though both the reporter and PR author are known, so add a credit such as Thanks @kshetrajna12 and @xuruiray.
  Confidence: 0.86

Overall correctness: patch is correct
Overall confidence: 0.86

Acceptance criteria:

• pnpm exec oxfmt --check --threads=1 CHANGELOG.md

What I checked:

• Current main still has the fast-exit behavior: executeMainSessionCronJob currently treats any recurring retryable busy heartbeat skip as success after queueing requestHeartbeatNow, which is the ghost-run shape reported in [Bug]: Recurring main-session cron jobs ghost (status:ok, durationMs ~16ms) when first heartbeat hits a retryable busy skip — early-exit fire-and-forgets without consuming queued cron event #75964. (src/cron/service/timer.ts:1399, 61fc62ade70a)
• Heartbeat skip reasons are explicitly retryable: requests-in-flight, cron-in-progress, and lanes-busy are the retryable busy skip reasons; the PR preserves the special cron-in-progress deferral and lets other retryable busy reasons use the bounded wait loop. (src/infra/heartbeat-wake.ts:13, 61fc62ade70a)
• Heartbeat runner ordering supports the reported reproduction: The runner can return requests-in-flight before the active-cron check, so a main-lane busy skip can happen before cron-in-progress takes over after lane pressure clears. (src/infra/heartbeat-runner.ts:1003, 61fc62ade70a)
• PR patch is functionally scoped: The PR removes the recurring-job fast exit and keeps the immediate deferred wake path only for HEARTBEAT_SKIP_CRON_IN_PROGRESS, matching the issue's proposed boundary. (src/cron/service/timer.ts:1395, e27073d2bf6a)
• Regression coverage was updated: The patched regression test now expects a temporary busy skip followed by a successful heartbeat run, with no deferred wake recorded on the retry-success path. (src/cron/service/timer.regression.test.ts:827, e27073d2bf6a)
• Changelog attribution policy gap: The new changelog entry is user-facing but has no Thanks @... attribution even though the human reporter and PR author are known; adjacent entries follow the attribution pattern. (CHANGELOG.md:36, e27073d2bf6a)

Likely related people:

• scoootscooob: Merged PR fix(cron): avoid busy-wait drift for recurring main jobs #58872 added the recurring main-session busy fast-exit and regression test that this PR refines. (role: introduced adjacent behavior; confidence: high; commits: 10750fb80e8f; files: src/cron/service/timer.ts, src/cron/service.issue-regressions.test.ts)
• steipete: Recent main history shows multiple cron and heartbeat maintenance commits on the central timer and heartbeat-runner paths. (role: recent maintainer; confidence: high; commits: 42d73fd955af, 61d53f98d314, f5e7557c70c1; files: src/cron/service/timer.ts, src/infra/heartbeat-runner.ts)
• obviyus: Recent work preserved deferred cron heartbeat targets and wake overrides on the same cron-to-heartbeat request contract. (role: adjacent owner; confidence: medium; commits: 1d4e4314dddc, 4c8299ca3d4f; files: src/cron/service.main-job-passes-heartbeat-target-last.test.ts, src/cron/service/timer.ts, src/infra/heartbeat-wake.ts)

Remaining risk / open question:

• The exact PR head still needs the remaining in-progress CI check to finish before merge.

Codex review notes: model gpt-5.5, reasoning high; reviewed against 61fc62ade70a.