model replace mode is not working - artifacts of another providers

[YankovskiyVS]

snippet:

      models:
        mode: replace
        providers:
          provider-name:
            api: openai-completions
            apiKey: ${PROVIDER_API_KEY}
            baseUrl: https://provider-url.com/v1
            headers:
              X-App-Title: some-app-title
            models:
              - id: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
                name: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
              - id: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
                name: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
              - id: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
                name: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2

Have added only ONE provider with the array of models (this is just an example) -> however when checking th UI i can see many providers which are not present in the config.json or in the spec of the instance (though i do see the provider i have added

Could you help me with such problem?

[stubbi]

Thanks for the report! Quick clarification to help narrow this down — models.mode is an OpenClaw application-level config key, and this operator passes spec.config.raw through to OpenClaw unchanged (it doesn't inject any default providers of its own). So the extra providers you're seeing are almost certainly being added by OpenClaw itself, not by the operator.

A couple of things that would help:

1. Could you share the full contents of /home/openclaw/.openclaw/openclaw.json from inside the pod? (kubectl exec <pod> -- cat /home/openclaw/.openclaw/openclaw.json) This will tell us whether the extra providers are actually in the config on disk, or whether they're only surfaced at the UI layer.
2. Are you using spec.config.mergeMode: merge? If so, providers from a previous version of your config could be persisting on the PVC — switching to overwrite (the default) would rule that out.
3. Can you reproduce this outside Kubernetes (e.g. running OpenClaw locally with the same models.mode: replace config)? If yes, this is an upstream OpenClaw issue rather than an operator issue and would be better tracked in the main OpenClaw repo.

Happy to dig further once we know whether it's surfacing at the config or UI layer.