task-status

What This Skill Does

The task-status skill provides OpenClaw agents with a structured mechanism for communicating the state of long-running operations back to the user. By standardizing status reporting, it eliminates user uncertainty during time-consuming tasks. The skill offers two primary modes: manual status updates for discrete milestones and automated periodic monitoring for background tasks that might otherwise appear 'stalled' to the end-user. It supports four distinct status categories (progress, success, error, warning) to ensure that the tone and urgency of the feedback are always contextually appropriate. The automated monitoring feature, in particular, ensures a 'heartbeat' of activity by sending updates every 5 seconds, which is crucial for maintaining transparency during complex background processes.

Installation

You can install this skill directly via the ClawHub command-line interface. Simply execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/mightyprime1/task-status

Use Cases

This skill is indispensable for agents that perform operations involving external API calls, file processing, or data migrations. It is ideal for:

• Data extraction agents that need to report batch completion percentages.
• Long-running automated testing suites that require heartbeat signals.
• Complex file conversion tasks where the agent might be processing large binary files for extended periods.
• Error handling routines that must notify the user immediately if authentication or connectivity fails.

Example Prompts

1. "I am starting a massive data migration. Please use the task-status monitoring tool to keep me updated every 5 seconds while you process these 500 database records."
2. "If the API connection times out during the file upload, send an error status using the task-status skill and then try one retry attempt."
3. "Once you have finished scraping all the URLs from the site, provide a final success status message summarizing how many pages were successfully crawled."

Tips & Limitations

To maximize the utility of this skill, adhere to the 140-character limit for all status messages; brevity ensures readability in chat interfaces. Use manual updates for operations lasting under 30 seconds to avoid flooding the chat window with unnecessary heartbeat messages. For tasks exceeding one minute, always leverage the periodic monitoring feature. Note that the script depends on local execution; ensure that your environment allows the agent to run the scripts located in the 'scripts/' directory. Always choose the most descriptive status type to allow users to filter or categorize agent output effectively.