keep

What This Skill Does

The keep skill acts as a persistent, reflective memory layer for OpenClaw. It shifts the AI agent from a stateless execution model to one that retains context, commitments, and insights across long-running sessions. By implementing a specific protocol block in the system rules, keep enables the agent to audit its actions through the lens of 'skillful action,' ensuring that the agent evaluates the impact of its choices before, during, and after execution.

Installation

To integrate keep into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hughpyle/keep

Upon initial usage, the skill performs a self-check to ensure the Protocol Block exists within your system rules file. If it is missing, the skill will automatically append the necessary instructions. For manual configuration or troubleshooting, ensure that the ## keep: Reflective Memory header is present in your system rules.

Use Cases

• Long-term Task Management: Track open-ended commitments across multiple work sessions.
• Learning & Knowledge Management: Capture, tag, and index important URLs, project insights, and file references for later retrieval.
• Ethical Audit & Reflection: Regularly pause to evaluate if current actions align with long-term goals or project requirements.
• Context Preservation: Quickly re-orient the agent to 'what is true now' after coming back to a project after a long break.

Example Prompts

1. "keep reflect on our progress today and list all my open commitments regarding the API refactor."
2. "keep put 'The authentication flow uses OIDC' -t topic=authentication -t type=technical-note"
3. "keep now 'The user wants to finalize the UI components before moving to the database schema update.'"

Tips & Limitations

• Consistency: The power of keep relies on you actually running the keep reflect command. If you skip reflection, you lose the primary benefit of the tool.
• Tag Hygiene: Keep your tags concise. Using consistent naming conventions for tags (e.g., -t topic=x) makes retrieval significantly easier when using keep find.
• Security: Since keep persists data, do not store sensitive credentials or API keys directly in the reflection store. Treat it as a 'work-in-progress' memory, not a secure vault.