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Awesome OpenClaw

A curated list of resources for getting the most out of OpenClaw. Skills, guides, talks, templates, tools, research. Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

This list is opinionated. Inclusion here means we've actually used it on a production OpenClaw deployment or seen it solve a real problem. Broken or abandoned links are removed aggressively. Last curated: July 2026, tracking OpenClaw 2026.6.11 stable.

Contents

Official / First-party

Guides & tutorials

Reference configs & starter kits

  • templates/ — this repo's starter kit. openclaw.example.json, SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, MEMORY.md, TOOLS.md. Clone and edit.
  • examples/vault/ — populated mini-vault showing what 2 weeks of usage looks like.
  • SCORECARD.md — 50-item Production Readiness Scorecard. Grade your setup against the guide.

Skills worth installing

(Opinion: the best skill is no skill — most of what ClawHub skills do should live in your own AGENTS.md. Install only when the alternative is genuinely harder.)

  • openclaw-team/* PR reviewer — official code-review skill. Wired into Task Brain's execution.sandbox.* bucket.
  • openclaw-team/* git-safeguard — blocks --force, reset --hard, dangerous rebase -i flags behind explicit approval. Ships as part of the "don't lose your branch" defaults.
  • Anything under openclaw-team/* — first-party publisher, lowest risk after reading the diff.

Never install:

  • Skills with <4 weeks of history, no public source, and aggressive update cadence. That was the ClawHavoc pattern.
  • Skills that demand write.fs.outside-workspace or control-plane.* for what sounds like a surface-level task.
  • "Productivity bundle" skills that install 20 tools at once. Pick the 2 you actually need.

See Part 23 — ClawHub Skills Marketplace for the full vetting checklist.

Memory & retrieval

  • memory-core — the built-in memory plugin with native dreaming (3 phases). Replaced the custom-autoDream patterns in v4.
  • memory-lancedb — LanceDB vector store. 2026.4.15-beta.1 added cloud storage mode.
  • Active Memory filters — current builds support per-conversation allowedChatIds / deniedChatIds, partial recall on timeout, and people-aware wiki provenance views.
  • Meeting Notes plugin — 2026.5.22 source-only external plugin for date-sharded meeting transcripts, manual imports, CLI reads, and Discord voice as the first live source. Define retention and redaction policy before enabling any live capture.
  • Memory promotion review — openclaw memory promote is dry-run by default; preview candidates, use memory promote-explain "<query>" to understand scoring, then --apply deliberately. memory status --deep probes vector-store and embedding readiness; --fix repairs stale recall locks.
  • Generic embedding provider contract — 2026.5.22 plugin SDK surface (contracts.embeddingProviders, api.registerEmbeddingProvider) that should make explicit OpenAI-compatible embedding providers cleaner.
  • Ollama — local embedding runtime. qwen3-embedding:0.6b is the right default for most setups.
  • LightRAG — graph + vector hybrid RAG. The right upgrade once your vault crosses ~500 files. See Part 18.
  • Repowise — structural index for codebases. Feeds workers a map instead of re-reading files. See Part 19.
  • vbfs/agent-memory-store (Apr 15, 2026) — 92.1% Recall@5 with zero LLM calls. Pure vector store + reranker; memory ops that don't burn Opus tokens. Covered in Part 22.
  • LightMem (arXiv 2604.07798) (Apr 12, 2026) — STM/MTM/LTM consolidation on a small model, 83 ms retrieval, +2.5 F1 on LoCoMo. The paper behind "run memory ops on an SLM."
  • Mem²Evolve (arXiv 2604.10923) (Apr 14, 2026) — co-evolves skill + memory populations; +18.53% over skill-only baselines. Research direction for Part 32.
  • AMFS (Apache 2.0 MCP server) (Apr 13, 2026) — drop-in MCP memory server, any model.

Orchestration patterns

Observability & evaluation

  • OpenClaw native diagnostics — late-May builds add sanitized secrets.prepare spans, bounded skill usage metrics, tool source/owner labels, Prometheus smoke aliases, and richer tasks maintenance --json.
  • Per-agent cost visibility — 2026.6.11 openclaw gateway usage-cost --agent <id> / --all shows spend per configured agent; cron it daily and diff. Pair with /usage full footers for in-channel per-turn cost. See Part 33.
  • Automatic fast mode — 2026.6.10 /fast auto runs short conversational turns in the provider's fast lane and returns to normal mode for longer work; /fast status shows the effective state through fallback switches.
  • LangFuse — the lightest-weight LLM tracing that actually works end-to-end with OpenClaw surfaces.
  • OpenTelemetry LLM instrumentation — the standards track. Pair with LangFuse or Grafana Tempo.
  • Canvas Model Auth status card — built into 2026.4.15-beta.1+. The one dashboard you actually read every day.
  • benchmarks/ — this repo's measurement harness. Copy, run against your own setup, submit a PR with your numbers.

Security & hardening

  • Koi Security — ClawHavoc writeup — the ecosystem-wide supply-chain campaign named in March 2026.
  • Antiy CERT — 1,184 malicious skills report (Feb 2026) — scale of the skills-ecosystem incident.
  • Trend Micro — Atomic Stealer via OpenClaw skills (Mar 2026) — 39 skills distributing macOS infostealer.
  • Kaspersky OpenClaw audit — 512 vulns, 8 critical including CVE-2026-25253 (1-click RCE) and WebSocket shared-auth scope escalation at CVSS 9.9.
  • This repo, Part 15 — Infrastructure Hardening — operational hardening checklist.
  • security.audit.suppressions — 2026.5.18 config escape hatch for reviewed audit findings. Use owner/reason/expiry; do not suppress unknown warnings.

Control plane & governance

  • Task Brain — OpenClaw's control plane. Semantic approval categories, agent-initiated denies, unified task flow registry.
  • Approval policy reference — templates/openclaw.example.json ships with a starting-point policy block.
  • Policy plugin — bundled in 2026.5.20. Run openclaw policy check for channel conformance checks, doctor findings, and opt-in repair; policy check --json emits stable attestation hashes you can schedule, store, and diff for drift gating.
  • Per-job cron fallbacks — 2026.6.11 openclaw cron edit <job> --fallbacks ... gives individual scheduled jobs their own fallback models (or a strict no-fallback run with --fallbacks ""), so overnight provider incidents degrade instead of killing the schedule.
  • Task maintenance JSON — openclaw tasks maintenance --json now explains stale-running retention/reconcile decisions for cron, CLI, backing sessions, and wedged sub-agents.

UI surfaces & clients

  • Canvas — the first-party control UI. Model Auth card, approvals, memory browser.
  • Webchat — the browser surface. 2026.4.15 stable tightened localRoots containment on audio; 2026.5.24-beta.1 voice callers can status/cancel/steer/follow-up active runs.
  • Matrix bridge — chat-in-Matrix surface. Pairing-auth tightened in 2026.4.15 stable; DM pairing-store entries can no longer authorize room control.
  • iMessage / WhatsApp approvals — thumbs-up/thumbs-down reactions are convenient allow-once/deny controls, but still require trusted approver policy.
  • Discord voice follow / wake-name gating — 2026.5.20+ voice sessions can follow configured users; 2026.5.24-beta.1 adds wake-name gating and mid-consult run controls.

Research papers

Talks, blog posts, podcasts

Benchmarks & leaderboards

Communities

  • OpenClaw Discord — official community. #self-hosting and #skills-security are the useful channels.
  • r/OpenClaw — mixed-quality, but good for spotting release-day issues before official channels catch up.
  • OpenClaw Matrix room — smaller, more technical.

Adjacent ecosystems

These are not OpenClaw, but they solve overlapping problems and the concepts transfer:

  • Letta (MemGPT) — one of the earliest "give the agent a real memory" projects. Influenced memory-core.
  • CrewAI — multi-agent orchestration. Compare against the Coordinator Protocol in Part 5.
  • LangGraph — graph-shaped agent orchestration. Useful mental model even if you don't ship on it.
  • Claude Code — Anthropic's first-party coding agent. The Memory Bridge (Part 13) exists partly to feed it your vault.
  • AMAP-ML/SkillClaw (Apr 10, 2026, 687 stars week-one) — population-level skill evolution. Explicitly supports OpenClaw as a first-class harness. Covered in Part 32.
  • Twill.ai (YC S25, HN Apr 11, 2026) — cloud-sandbox agent delegation. The architectural alternative to self-hosted harnesses; compared in Part 24.
  • Amika (YouTube demo, Apr 13, 2026) — similar cloud-sandbox positioning to Twill.
  • Andon Labs — Agent-infrastructure blog — production-ops essays on running agents at scale. Good cross-pollination for operators.
  • Aider — another strong coding agent, pair-well with OpenClaw for architecture.

How to contribute

  1. New link or resource? Open a PR that edits this file. Include a one-sentence justification for why you'd link it to a newcomer.
  2. Link is broken or abandoned? Open an issue with the "Correction" template.
  3. Keep it to the same opinionated bar: has this solved a real problem on a real OpenClaw deployment?

Also see the larger CONTRIBUTING.md.