Triage

What This Skill Does

The Triage skill acts as an intelligent, auto-adaptive project manager for your OpenClaw agent. It systematically evaluates incoming tasks based on urgency and importance, assigning a priority level (P0-P3) to ensure that critical work never gets buried under low-impact noise. Unlike static prioritization tools, Triage learns from your specific behavior. If you frequently override its decisions, the skill observes the pattern, asks for confirmation, and internalizes new rules to better align with your professional workflow. By following the core loop of Assessment, Classification, Routing, and Learning, the Triage skill creates a dynamic, self-optimizing queue that ensures you stay focused on what matters most.

Installation

To integrate the Triage skill into your OpenClaw environment, run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/triage

Ensure that you have the latest version of the OpenClaw agent installed to guarantee full support for the adaptive learning features and rule-based pattern matching stored in patterns.md.

Use Cases

• Project Management: Automatically escalate production-critical bugs (P0) while scheduling routine documentation tasks (P3) for later.
• Inbox Management: Filtering high-priority requests from Slack or email, ensuring blocking tasks are surfaced before routine inquiries.
• Workflow Optimization: Gradually teaching the agent your specific preferences for timing and task-type hierarchies, effectively offloading the mental tax of task prioritization.
• Emergency Response: Maintaining a strict interrupt-driven queue where system-critical failures automatically pause lower-priority maintenance tasks.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, I have a list of tasks from my team. Please Triage them and tell me what needs my immediate attention."
2. "This task regarding the database migration is actually higher priority than the UI update; please mark that as P1 and swap their positions in the queue."
3. "Hey, treat all future requests from the DevOps channel as P1, as they are usually time-sensitive."

Tips & Limitations

Start with the default settings and observe the agent's behavior. The skill is designed to be conservative; it will only propose permanent rules after observing at least two instances of a user-initiated pattern change. Be mindful that Triage performs best when provided with context in its source documents (signals.md and patterns.md). If the agent is missing context, manually update these files to seed the model with your specific domain requirements. Remember that the agent will always re-triage the queue if a P0 task enters the system, so ensure you have persistent save states enabled to avoid losing progress on ongoing work.