error-guard

⚠️ System‑level skill (Advanced users)

This skill defines the control‑plane safety primitives for OpenClaw. It is intentionally minimal, non‑blocking, and designed to prevent agent freezes, deadlocks, and unrecoverable states when running long‑lived or high‑risk workloads.

Design Principles

Warning: This skill operates at the agent control‑plane level. It should be installed only by users who understand OpenClaw’s execution model and are running workloads that can block, hang, or run for extended periods.

Main agent never blocks: no long exec, no external I/O, no LLM calls.
Event-driven: workers emit events; the control plane listens.
Fail-safe first: recovery commands must always respond.
Minimal state: track only task metadata (never payloads).

Command Surface (Phase 1)

/status

Report current system health and task registry state.

Returns:

Active tasks (taskId, type, state)
Start time and last heartbeat
Flags for stalled or overdue tasks

Constraints:

Must run in constant time
Must not call any model or external API

/flush

Emergency stop.

Immediately:

Cancel all active tasks
Kill active exec/process sessions
Clear pending message queue
Reset in-memory task registry

Constraints:

Must always respond
No waiting on workers
No model calls

/recover

Safe recovery sequence.

Steps:

Execute /flush
Reset control-plane state
Optionally reload skills/state (no container restart)

Future Extensions (Not Implemented Yet)

Sub-agent runner helper (event-driven)
Task watchdogs with TTL and silence detection
Structured event protocol (task.started, task.heartbeat, task.completed, ...)
Back-pressure and task classes (interactive / batch / background)

Security & Privacy

This skill does not store payloads, prompts, messages, or model outputs
Only minimal task metadata is persisted (taskId, timestamps, state)
No API keys, credentials, or user data are read or written
Safe to publish and share publicly

Non-Goals

No business logic
No background polling loops
No user-facing features
No LLM reasoning paths

This skill is the last line of defense. Keep it small, fast, and reliable.