/skill my_skill does not work

[trail hornet]

I have a simple skill "lol" that fetches data from an API.

It's very hard to get the agent to actually use it. It'll complain, hey I don't see a tool with the name "lol", or I can't run that. Even though it runs it on different chats, and can run it once it reads the SKILL.md manually

What's the trick?

[dire pier]

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[limber stratus]

Two big gotchas here:

1. A skill is not a tool.
   Skills are instructions that teach the model to use real tools (web_fetch, web_search, exec, etc). There is no tool named lol unless you wrote a plugin that registers one.
   So if your SKILL.md says “call the lol tool”, the model will literally try tool_use: { name: "lol" } and you’ll get “tool not found”.

2. Skills are snapshotted at session start.
   OpenClaw takes a “skills snapshot” when a session starts and reuses it for that chat. If you installed/edited the skill after the session began, that chat won’t “see” it until you start a new session. Easiest fix: send /new in the chat/thread where it “won’t use it”.
   (Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/skills — see “Session snapshot (performance)”)

Practical checklist:

• Confirm it’s eligible on the machine/agent that’s running:

  openclaw --version
  openclaw skills list --eligible