Skill Doctor
What it does
OpenClaw loads skills at startup. When a skill fails to load — corrupt frontmatter, bad cron expression, mismatched STATE_SCHEMA — it silently disappears from the registry. There is no error surfaced to the agent.
Skill Doctor runs a full diagnostic pass over all installed skills and reports every failure that would cause silent non-loading, so you can fix problems before they become invisible gaps.
When to invoke
- After installing new skills or upgrading openclaw-superpowers
- When a skill you expect to find is missing from the registry
- As a post-install gate inside
install.sh - Manually, any time something feels off with skill behaviour
Diagnostic checks
Skill Doctor runs 6 checks per skill:
| Check | Failure condition |
|---|---|
| YAML parse | Frontmatter cannot be parsed by a YAML parser |
| Required fields | name or description absent from frontmatter |
| Path conventions | Skill directory name does not match name: field |
| Cron format | cron: present but not a valid 5-field cron expression |
| Stateful coherence | stateful: true but STATE_SCHEMA.yaml missing |
| Schema validity | STATE_SCHEMA.yaml present but missing version: or fields: |
Output levels
- PASS — skill will load correctly
- WARN — skill loads but has a non-critical issue (e.g. schema present but
stateful:missing) - FAIL — skill will not load; must fix before use
How to use
python3 doctor.py --scan # Full diagnostic pass
python3 doctor.py --scan --only-failures # Show FAILs only
python3 doctor.py --scan --skill cron-hygiene # Single skill
python3 doctor.py --fix-hint cron-hygiene # Print actionable fix suggestion
python3 doctor.py --status # Summary of last scan
python3 doctor.py --format json # Machine-readable outputProcedure
Step 1 — Run the scan
python3 doctor.py --scanReview the output. Each skill gets a one-line verdict: PASS / WARN / FAIL.
Step 2 — Triage FAILs first
For each FAIL, run --fix-hint <skill-name> to get an actionable repair suggestion. Skill Doctor never modifies skill files itself — it tells you exactly what to change.
Step 3 — Review WARNs
WARNs do not block loading but indicate drift from conventions. Common WARN: STATE_SCHEMA.yaml exists without stateful: true in frontmatter. Fix by adding the frontmatter field.
Step 4 — Re-scan to confirm
After applying fixes, re-run --scan and verify no FAILs remain.
Step 5 — Write scan result to state
After a clean pass, the scan summary is automatically written to state. Use --status in future sessions to surface the last known health without re-scanning.
State
Skill Doctor persists scan results in ~/.openclaw/skill-state/skill-doctor/state.yaml.
Fields: last_scan_at, skills_scanned, fail_count, warn_count, violations list.
After a clean install, fail_count and warn_count should both be 0.
Integration
Add to the end of install.sh:
echo "Running Skill Doctor post-install check..."
python3 ~/.openclaw/extensions/superpowers/skills/openclaw-native/skill-doctor/doctor.py --scan --only-failuresThis surfaces any broken skills immediately after install rather than letting them silently disappear.