about standing order

[wind pelican]

I have a standing order to go find 3 new leads, how can I tell to to stop if it can't find 3 after a certain number of tries

[mild ice]

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[bleak schooner]

For that, put the stop condition in the standing order itself, and use cron timeout as the wall-clock guard.

Example wording for the standing order / cron message:

Goal: find up to 3 qualified new leads.

Attempt budget:
- Try at most 5 search passes total.
- A pass means one distinct source/query strategy.
- Stop early once 3 qualified leads are found.
- If fewer than 3 are found after 5 passes, stop anyway.
- Report the leads found, the sources checked, and why the remaining slots were not filled.
- Do not keep retrying silently or broaden criteria without approval.

If this is run by cron, also add a runtime cap so the job cannot run forever, e.g. --timeout-seconds 600. That timeout limits the whole run; the “5 passes max” rule limits the agent’s behavior.

[bleak schooner]

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/automation/standing-orders and https://docs.openclaw.ai/automation/cron-jobs

If it’s behaving differently from that, first thing I’d check is your version with openclaw --version, because cron/standing-order behavior has changed a bit across releases.