If you’ve already got OpenClaw up and running, the single most important thing you should set up next is Skills. I genuinely believe this is what separates a basic AI assistant from one that actually works for you — to your exact specifications, every single time. In this guide, I’ll walk you through what Skills are, why I build my own instead of downloading them, and how you can create custom Skills that transform your OpenClaw bot into a truly personalized AI agent.
What Are OpenClaw Skills and Why Do They Matter?
Skills are essentially instruction sets that tell your OpenClaw agent how to perform specific tasks — think of them like muscle memory for your bot. Without Skills, your agent starts fresh every session. It forgets your preferences, your formatting choices, your workflow quirks. With Skills, it wakes up knowing exactly what to do and how you like it done.
This matters more than most people realize. OpenClaw, like most AI agents, clears its context window between sessions. The best analogy I can think of is that your bot essentially “dies” every day and comes back trying to remember everything. Skills solve this problem by giving your agent persistent knowledge — it’s like your bot knowing jiu-jitsu without having to relearn it every morning.
The OpenClaw ecosystem now has over 3,200 community-built Skills available on ClawHub, the official skills registry. That’s a massive library covering everything from browser automation to financial tracking. But as I’ll explain, I think building your own is the way to go.
Why I Build My Own Skills Instead of Downloading Them
I’ll be honest — I don’t really go on ClawHub to download skills. There are two reasons for this. First, everyone has different preferences and workflows. Someone else’s presentation skill might format things completely differently from how I want them. Second, and this is important, there have been some security concerns with community-uploaded skills in the past. ClawHub now has virus scanning, but when you’re giving an AI agent instructions that run on your machine, I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Instead, I design my own Skills by simply talking to my bot. I didn’t write a single line of the skill file myself — I just told my agent what my preferences were, how I wanted things structured, and said “save this as a skill.” The bot wrote up the entire SKILL.md document for me. That’s the beauty of it: you don’t need to be technical to create powerful, custom Skills.
My Daily Presentation Skill: A Real Example
Let me show you a concrete example. I have a presentation skill that automatically produces daily briefings about what’s happening in both crypto and AI. Every morning at exactly 8:00 AM, a cron job triggers this skill, and by the time I sit down with my coffee, there’s a fresh research presentation waiting for me.
The skill knows the structure I want, the research depth I expect, where to save the files, and even which directory to use. It actually calls upon another skill — a deep research skill — to gather the information before assembling the presentation. Skills can build on top of each other like that, which is where things get really powerful.
The cron job scheduling is key here. OpenClaw lets you set up scheduled tasks so your agent runs specific Skills at set times without any manual input. I have mine set to run first thing in the morning so all the news is fresh. I can then decide what to cover on my YouTube channel or use for other content. It’s hands-off automation that actually delivers quality output because the skill specifications are dialed in.
How to Create and Refine Your Own Skills
Creating a skill is surprisingly simple. Here’s my approach:
Start by talking to your bot. Tell it what you want done. Be specific about your preferences — the format, the tone, the sources, the output location. Don’t worry about documenting it perfectly; just have a natural conversation about what you need.
Ask it to save the skill. Once you’re happy with how the bot handles your task, say something like “save this as a skill” or “create a skill for this workflow.” Your agent will generate a structured SKILL.md file with all the specifications.
Refine over time. This is the part most people skip. After using a skill for a while, you’ll notice things you want to change. Just tell your bot: “Update your presentation skill — I prefer light theme now” or “Your research wasn’t deep enough, make sure you check at least five sources next time and update that in your skill.” The bot handles the file updates automatically.
The key phrases to remember are “update my skill” and “save this as a skill.” These trigger the agent to modify or create the SKILL.md files that persist between sessions.
ClawHub: Good for Inspiration, Use With Caution
While I prefer building my own, I do think ClawHub is worth browsing for inspiration. Seeing how other people structure their skills can give you ideas for your own workflows. The platform uses vector search to help you find relevant skills quickly, and there are some genuinely creative community contributions — from self-improving agents to advanced browser automation.
That said, I’d recommend using ClawHub as a reference rather than blindly downloading and installing skills. Read through what a skill does, understand the approach, and then build your own version tailored to your needs. As a human, you want to filter out the good from the bad, especially when it comes to code that runs autonomously on your machine.
Final Thoughts
Skills are what make OpenClaw go from a cool toy to an indispensable daily tool. The combination of custom specifications, cron job scheduling, and the ability to chain skills together means you can build genuinely sophisticated automation workflows — all by just talking to your bot.
If you’re just getting started, pick one repetitive task you do regularly and turn it into a skill. Refine it over a few days. Once you see how much time it saves, you’ll want to skill-ify everything. And if you have suggestions for what we should cover next, drop a comment — my bot actually has a skill that reads through comments and suggests video topics to me. So yes, your feedback literally gets processed and repeated back to me multiple times.
Make sure to subscribe to @BoxminingAI for more guides, and join our Discord community to share your own skill setups with the growing community.
Michael Gu
Michael Gu, Creator of Boxmining, stared in the Blockchain space as a Bitcoin miner in 2012. Something he immediately noticed was that accurate information is hard to come by in this space. He started Boxmining in 2017 mainly as a passion project, to educate people on digital assets and share his experiences. Being based in Asia, Michael also found a huge discrepancy between digital asset trends and knowledge gap in the West and China.