Troubleshooting
Common issues and how to fix them.
Bots not appearing in Discord
Cause: Missing Discord gateway intents.
Fix: Go to the Discord Developer Portal → select your application → Bot → scroll to Privileged Gateway Intents. Enable both:
- Message Content Intent
- Server Members Intent
Click Save Changes, then restart with disclaw-team stop && disclaw-team start.
This is the most common cause of bots that appear online but don’t respond to messages. See Discord Setup for the full intents walkthrough.
Two-phase restart on first run
On first launch, bots restart once automatically approximately 30 seconds after startup. This is expected behavior — Claude Code initializes, then the harness restarts each bot with the full configuration injected. Your bots will be fully operational after the restart.
Wait 60 seconds total before assuming something is wrong. Do not interrupt the process or run disclaw-team stop during this window.
Bots fail to start silently
Cause: Claude Code startup timing. The start command sends keystrokes to confirm the Claude startup prompt, but if Claude is slow to initialize, the keystrokes miss the prompt and the session stalls.
Fix:
- Run
disclaw-team attachto open the tmux session - Use
Ctrl+Bthen a window number to cycle through bot windows - In any window showing a Claude startup prompt, press Enter manually to proceed
Once confirmed, the bot will continue initializing normally.
Token errors
The environment variable naming formula is strict:
| Bot ID | Token env var |
|---|---|
bot-1 | BOT_1_TOKEN |
my-bot | MY_BOT_TOKEN |
researcher | RESEARCHER_TOKEN |
The rule: hyphens become underscores, the name is uppercased, and _TOKEN is appended.
Behavior by format version:
- New format: A missing token logs a warning and silently skips that bot. Other bots continue starting.
- Legacy format: A missing token is a hard error that aborts the entire startup sequence.
Fix: Open your .env file and verify each token variable matches the formula for its bot ID. Then run disclaw-team status to confirm which bots are running.