Lesson 26: Essential Skills — Giving Your Agent Superpowers

Week 6: putting the agent to work

You have an agent with a brain (model), personality (system prompt), and communication channel (Telegram). Now we give it superpowers with skills.

openclaw skill install skill-name

Skills are installed in ~/.openclaw/skills/ (global) or ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/ (per workspace).

1. Web search: Tavily (requires API key, free tier available), DuckDuckGo (free, no API key), or SearXNG (self-hosted, total privacy).

2. URL reading (web fetch): Opens a URL and extracts the full content.

3. File reading: Processes documents you send via Telegram: PDFs, text, spreadsheets.

4. Reddit (readonly): Search discussions, read comments. Very useful for opinions and experiences.

5. Hacker News: Real-time tech and startup content.

Each skill may require additional configuration. Check the documentation for each skill on Clawhub.

Global: Available to all workspaces. Workspace: Only for the active workspace.

Clawhub.ai: Skill directory for OpenClaw
Essential skills: Web search, URL reading, file reading, Reddit, Hacker News
Global vs workspace skills: Global for general use, workspace for specific projects

Next lesson: Automations — letting the agent work on its own with cron jobs.