#openclaw#skills#customization#tools

Give Your Assistant Superpowers: Skills Turn It from Talker into Doer

2 min read

An assistant that can only chat is like hiring a brilliant employee and giving them no tools. Waste of talent.

Skills are how you equip your assistant to actually do things.

What You'll Learn

  • Understand what a Skill is
  • Enable built-in skills
  • Add your own custom skills
  • Understand skill priority and load paths

What Is a Skill?

A Skill is usually a small instruction document called SKILL.md. It explains:

  • What the skill can do
  • When it should be used
  • Which tools and steps are allowed

Think of it as the assistant's playbook. Give it a browser playbook and it can search the web. Give it a file playbook and it can organize your documents.

Built-in vs Custom

OpenClaw ships with some useful built-in skills, and the community keeps adding more. You can either:

  • Use built-in skills directly from the dashboard
  • Write your own with a simple SKILL.md file

The Smart Way to Create Custom Skills

If you want to change or add a skill, do not edit the original files in the OpenClaw repo. The next update may overwrite them and ruin your day.

Put your custom version here instead:

~/.openclaw/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md

Priority order

workspace/skills  →  ~/.openclaw/skills  →  built-in  →  extraDirs

The first match wins.

Manage Skills from the Dashboard

Open Control UI → Skills tab. From there you can:

  • View every available skill
  • Enable or disable them with one click
  • Configure skills that need API keys
  • Install community-contributed skills

After saving, OpenClaw usually hot-reloads the changes without restarting the Gateway.

Load Skills from a Custom Folder

If you want to keep all your custom skills in one central directory:

// ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json
{
  "skills": {
    "load": {
      "extraDirs": ["/your/custom-skill-folder"]
    }
  }
}

Next Up

Now that your assistant has tools, it needs its own office. In the next part we will talk about memory and workspaces.

← Previous: Channel setup | 👉 Where is your assistant's brain? Memory and workspace