Openclaw SKILLS Setup Guide

Skills beat the daily context wipe — design them by talking to your bot, not by downloading them.

Why skills come first

The creator calls skills the "number one most important thing you should get set up on your open claw." The reason is structural: "your bot dies every day" — the context window is cleared overnight, so anything stored only in chat memory is gone by morning. A skill persists, so the bot can re-learn the workflow on the next session.

Don't pull skills from clawhub

He explicitly avoids clawhub downloads for two reasons. One, someone else's skill encodes their preferences, not yours. Two, clawhub has had "issues with viruses or whatnot," and even with the new virus scan, the creator does not "fully say, 'Hey, browse skill hub.'" His recommendation: use clawhub for inspiration only, then have the bot write the skill to your spec.

Build a skill by conversation, not by typing

The walkthrough shows a presentation skill he produced without writing markdown himself. He told the bot his preferences, said "save this up as a skill," and the bot documented the spec — including required structure, host location, and a chained deep research skill. The full output lands in the correct folder and directory on its own.

Schedule it with cron

The daily briefing runs as a cron job at 8:00 AM sharp. He picks morning deliberately so the news is fresh and he can "choose to cover it or not" for the YouTube pipeline. The skill also chains to the presentation skill, so a single prompt — "make a new presentation about what's new in the latest open claw 2024 and include points from our last presentation" — triggers both research and slide output.

Iterate via natural-language updates

Refinement stays conversational. Phrases like "update your skill on making presentations," "I like light theme," or "you didn't do a good enough job on research… update that in your skill" are the actual commands — no YAML editing required.