context-cleanup

What This Skill Does

The context-cleanup skill is a specialized utility for the OpenClaw agent designed to maintain a lean, efficient, and responsive workspace. As AI agents interact with long-term projects, the accumulated memory logs often become cluttered with outdated, trivial, or redundant information, commonly referred to as 'context bloat.' This skill proactively identifies low-value memory notes, organizes them, and moves them to archival storage instead of permanently deleting them, ensuring your workspace remains performant without sacrificing historical data.

Installation

To install this skill, run the following command in your terminal within the OpenClaw environment: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/irideas/context-cleanup

Use Cases

• Project Housekeeping: Regularly clearing out temporary design thoughts or abandoned branches from memory to keep the model's focus on active tasks.
• Context Optimization: Reducing the token count for long-running sessions, which directly improves the speed and accuracy of agent responses.
• Workspace Auditing: Reviewing what the agent deems 'low-value' to get a better understanding of how the model categorizes information.
• Compliance & Archiving: Safely storing older context in a structured way that avoids deletion but keeps it out of the active working set.

Example Prompts

• 'Hey OpenClaw, please run a context cleanup analysis to see how much bloat is in our current workspace.'
• 'I need to free up memory; can you generate an archival plan for all notes older than 2026-03-01?'
• 'Start the cleanup process, but please show me the plan first and wait for my approval before archiving anything.'

Tips & Limitations

• Always verify the plan: While the skill includes a --dry-run flag, you should always review the plan output before proceeding with the archive step to ensure important documents aren't inadvertently moved.
• Safety Boundaries: The skill is designed to never touch protected files such as MEMORY.md, specs/, or AGENTS.md. These files are considered critical for agent function and are excluded by default.
• Automation: Use the --yes flag with caution. Only enable it in non-interactive CI/CD pipelines where you have established robust pre-check routines.
• Manual Recovery: Since the skill uses an archive method rather than a hard delete, you can always recover files if the agent misclassifies an item, provided you know where the archive directory is stored.