OpenClaw Agent Skills is the curated public source for small, reusable agent workflows. A skill belongs here when several repositories or agents benefit from one shared operational contract.
- A distinct recurring workflow, tool boundary, or evidence contract—not generic engineering judgment restated as instructions.
- Portable behavior that is useful across projects and agent runtimes.
- A narrow responsibility with explicit inputs, outputs, failure modes, and safety boundaries.
- Proportionate implementation and proof. Dependencies, privileges, and new automation must be necessary for the workflow itself.
- Public, vendor-neutral guidance where practical. Provider-specific behavior is acceptable when its real contract is documented and tested directly.
Examples include review closeout, source-blind behavior validation, remote validation, transcript handling, and focused handoff workflows.
- Product-specific skills, generated API catalogs, and service-owned workflows stay with their source project or a community catalog such as ClawHub.
- Repository instructions and callers own product policy, durable memory, and task context. Shared helpers should consume bounded explicit inputs rather than create parallel policy or persistence systems.
- Do not hide materially different provider cost, quality, eligibility, or failure semantics behind one portable convenience flag. Prefer explicit controls; require exact runtime proof for provider-specific tiers or modes.
- Repository-relative, bounded, read-only inputs are the default. Broader host paths, external repositories, credentials, publishing, or privileged automation require a narrow ownership model and end-to-end isolation proof.
- Distribution infrastructure is not bundled merely to publish one skill. Prefer existing source-repository and community publication paths.
- Solve one coherent user problem at a time; split unrelated policy, persistence, provider, and publishing surfaces.
- Validate the installed or built workflow through the real affected boundary. Dry runs, fixtures, and command-construction tests support but do not replace runtime proof for claims about external tools or services.
- Keep public CLI and artifact contracts predictable. Add compatibility only for explicit shipped contracts, not speculative future use.
- Prefer a smaller catalog with clear ownership and strong proof over broad coverage with duplicated judgment or hidden operational risk.