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: April 2026, tracking OpenClaw 2026.4.15 stable.
- Official / First-party
- Guides & tutorials
- Reference configs & starter kits
- Skills worth installing
- Memory & retrieval
- Orchestration patterns
- Observability & evaluation
- Security & hardening
- Control plane & governance
- UI surfaces & clients
- Research papers
- Talks, blog posts, podcasts
- Benchmarks & leaderboards
- Communities
- Adjacent ecosystems
- openclaw/openclaw — the core framework. Releases + changelog live here.
- clawdocs.org — official documentation. Reference config schema, plugin API, gateway methods.
- openclawai.io/changelog — release notes, beta announcements.
- ClawHub — skills marketplace. 13K+ skills after the March 2026 wave. See Part 23 before you install anything.
- Task Brain blog post — the canonical "why a control plane" read.
- OpenClaw Optimization Guide — this repo. 32 parts, production-tested on 2026.4.15 stable.
- Official "Getting Started" path — the minimum-viable setup. Read this first if you're brand new.
- The OpenClaw CVE flood, Feb–Mar 2026 — the definitive writeup on the ClawHavoc supply-chain campaign.
- Migration Guide — v3 → v4 → v2026.4.15 stable — opinionated upgrade paths.
- 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.
(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'sexecution.sandbox.*bucket.openclaw-team/*git-safeguard — blocks--force,reset --hard, dangerousrebase -iflags 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-workspaceorcontrol-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-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.
- Ollama — local embedding runtime.
qwen3-embedding:0.6bis 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.
- Anthropic's 5 coordination patterns (official taxonomy, Apr 10, 2026) — claude.com/blog/multi-agent-coordination-patterns. Generator-verifier, orchestrator-subagent, agent teams, hierarchical, network. Covered in Part 5.
- Coordinator Protocol (Research → Synthesis → Implement → Verify) — this repo, Part 5.
- frankbria/ralph-claude-code (8.7K stars) — the reference Ralph Loop implementation. OpenClaw-specific port: Ralph Loops + OpenClaw (DEV, Apr 13, 2026). Covered in Part 30.
- Sub-agents are context garbage collection (heyuan110, Apr 13, 2026) — the reframe that anchors Part 5.
- Builder.io — Claude Code sub-agents (Apr 16, 2026) — the production-grade take on sub-agent patterns.
- Memory Bridge — push your vault into Codex / Claude Code / Cursor before they start. Part 13.
- ACP spec — Agent Communication Protocol, v4.2. The inter-agent message format.
- Git worktrees for parallel AI agents (Upsun, Apr 14, 2026) — the worktree-per-agent pattern. See also Part 15.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Matrix bridge — chat-in-Matrix surface. Pairing-auth tightened in 2026.4.15 stable; DM pairing-store entries can no longer authorize room control.
- Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts — the foundational "why context bloat is lethal" paper. The entire Speed pillar is downstream of this.
- MMEB: Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark — where Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B earned its #1 rank. Relevant to Part 10.
- LightRAG: Simple and Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation — the paper behind Part 18.
- Terp — Running OpenClaw In Production (2026) — the talk this guide is derived from. Slide deck: (link when public).
- OpenClaw team — "Why We Built Task Brain" (Mar 2026) — the official framing for the control-plane shift.
- Karpathy — The LLM Wiki (YouTube, Apr 10, 2026, 4.3K views) — the three-tier file-hierarchy pattern that anchors Part 31.
- Aaron Fulkerson — Karpathy's LLM Wiki in production (Exo, Apr 12, 2026) — a concrete implementation of the same pattern.
- AaronRoeF/claude-code-patterns — 153 catalogued patterns. Useful negative-example lookup when wondering "has someone tried X?"
- The Harness Is Everything (Medium, Apr 13, 2026) — the widely-shared distillation of the Princeton NLP thesis. Opens the README.
- Trensee — The Harness Is Everything (Apr 12, 2026) — independent convergence on the same thesis.
- Atlan — The Agent Harness 2026 — the third independent convergence.
- Ido Green — Agentic engineering essays (Apr 2026) — practitioner-voice writing on day-to-day harness ergonomics.
- Spec-Driven Development: The Key To Scaling Autonomous AI Agents (Time, Apr 14, 2026) — the AWS Kiro case study (18 months → 76 days). Anchors Part 26 § SDD.
- Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents (MindStudio, Apr 15, 2026) — why CLAUDE.md-as-dumping-ground is the wrong default.
- Stop Stuffing Your Custom Instructions (Medium, Apr 12, 2026) — companion argument.
- Claude Code Hooks Automation (Claude Lab, Apr 10, 2026) — the deepest dive on the 18 hook events + exit codes. Covered in Part 29.
- Claude Code Hooks: Automate Your Coding Workflow In 2026 (DEV, Apr 12, 2026) — practical hook recipes.
- Amit Kothari — What Is A Hook, exit codes, and StopFailure — the exit-code debugging war story. Referenced in Part 29.
- Amit Ray — CLAUDE.md vs AGENTS.md vs MEMORY.md vs SKILLS.md vs CONTEXT.md (Apr 14, 2026) — the file-hierarchy cheat sheet the ecosystem needed.
- Claude API Prompt Caching: 80% off (DEV, Apr 14, 2026) — the 5-minute TTL trap surfaced. Referenced in Part 2.
- SWE-bench — coding-agent leaderboard. Relevant to model selection in Part 6.
- MMEB leaderboard — multimodal embedding rankings. Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B currently #1.
- benchmarks/ — this repo's numbers. Submit yours via PR.
- OpenClaw Discord — official community.
#self-hostingand#skills-securityare 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.
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.
- 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.
- Link is broken or abandoned? Open an issue with the "Correction" template.
- Keep it to the same opinionated bar: has this solved a real problem on a real OpenClaw deployment?
Also see the larger CONTRIBUTING.md.