If your OpenClaw agent has gone quiet and you're staring at a chat that won't reply, the cause is almost always one of five things. Run through these in order before you tear the install down. Step 1. Is the daemon actually running? The agent stops the moment the daemon dies. Check the process is alive. If you ran `onboard --install-daemon` twice in the past, you might have two competing instances. Kill them both and start one cleanly. Step 2. Is the model endpoint reachable? If you're routing through OpenRouter, log into the OpenRouter dashboard and check the Activity tab. No requests showing means the daemon isn't getting through. Usually that's an expired token or a typo'd token-provider value. Re-run the onboard command with a fresh key if you're not sure. Step 3. Has the channel webhook been claimed twice? Telegram, Slack and Discord will silently swallow messages if a webhook is set to a different URL. In Telegram, `getWebhookInfo` against the bot token tells you exactly what URL is registered. If it's wrong, `setWebhook` to the right one (or `deleteWebhook` and let OpenClaw register itself). Step 4. Did the skill actually load? A malformed SKILL.md (bad YAML frontmatter, wrong indentation) fails silently, and the agent falls back to "no relevant skill" behaviour. Check the daemon logs. A parse error will be sitting there if that's the cause. Step 5. Are you out of credits or rate-limited? Free models hit usage caps mid-conversation. Paid endpoints fail when the balance is empty. Check the provider dashboard before assuming it's an OpenClaw bug. Nine times out of ten it's #1 or #3. Drop the symptom in the comments if you're stuck and the community will help you narrow it down. What did you have to check the last time your agent went quiet?

Skills are how you teach OpenClaw to do specific things consistently. Once you've got one wired up, you can call it from any agent, on any channel, with the same predictable behaviour. Here's the fastest way to set up your first one. Step 1. Create the skill directory. Inside your OpenClaw install, head to the skills/ folder and make a new directory named after what your skill does. Keep it lowercase and hyphen-separated. Example: skills/weekly-summary/. Step 2. Add a SKILL.md file. This is the brain of the skill. At the top, drop in YAML frontmatter with at least name and description. The description matters, it's what your agent uses to decide when to trigger the skill, so be specific about the situations it should fire in. Below the frontmatter, write the instructions in plain English. Treat it like a one-page brief for a junior teammate. Step 3. Drop in any helper files. If your skill needs a template, reference doc, or prompt fragment, put it alongside the SKILL.md in the same folder. The agent can pull from anything in there at runtime. Step 4. Reload the daemon. Restart your OpenClaw daemon so it picks up the new directory. The skill should show up in your agent's available toolkit on the next invocation. Once you've built one or two, the pattern becomes muscle memory. ClawHub (clawhub.ai) is also a good place to browse community-built skills for inspiration before rolling your own. What's the first skill you'd want to build for your agent? Drop it below.

If you've been using OpenClaw and noticed your agent forgets everything between sessions, you're missing one of the most useful features in the platform: persistent memory. Out of the box, every conversation starts fresh. The agent doesn't remember your project, your preferences, or what you discussed yesterday. For one-off tasks that's fine. For an agent you actually rely on, it's painful. Here's how to fix it in about 5 minutes. Step 1 — Find your MEMORY.md file Every OpenClaw install has a MEMORY.md file in its config directory. This is where persistent agent knowledge lives across sessions. If you've never edited it, it's probably empty. Step 2 — Add the things your agent should always know Open MEMORY.md and write things like: - Who you are and what you do - - Projects or clients the agent helps with - - Tone and writing style preferences - - Tools, accounts, or services it should know about Plain English works fine. No special syntax needed. Step 3 — Use it Next time you start a session, the agent reads MEMORY.md automatically. Ask it something it should now "remember" — like "what's my tone of voice for client work?" — and you'll see the difference instantly. Step 4 — Update it as you go When you tell your agent something useful, ask it to add that fact to MEMORY.md. Over time you build up an agent that actually knows you, instead of one that resets every morning. This is the single biggest upgrade most people miss. What's the first thing you'd put in your MEMORY.md? Drop it below.