Skills
Skills
A “skill” in Lobster comes in two shapes:
- Slash commands you type in Claude Code on the laptop —
/lobster-status,/dump,/save-to-spotify. The human invokes these. - Agent capabilities the Lobster agent loads on the gateway host —
apple-pim,sonos,travel-hub. The agent invokes these in response to natural-language requests like “play classical music in the kitchen” or “what flights does my partner have this week?”
The two sets overlap (the dump and save-to-spotify skills appear in both), but their entry points differ: one is invoked at the keyboard, the other is invoked by the agent reasoning over a message.
This page is an index. The ops side has its own detailed page; the rest links to per-feature guides where they exist.
Ops skills
The /lobster-* slash commands diagnose, repair, and operate the Lobster host. They ship as a single Claude Code plugin called lobster-ops and cover 38 commands across nine domains: system health, healing, sessions, cron, channels, agents, auth, digests, and lifecycle.
The full reference is at Lobster Ops Plugin.
A few high-value commands to know:
/lobster-status— live system health dashboard. Always the first stop./lobster-heal— one-shot auto-fix for common gateway issues./lobster-investigate— open-ended root-cause walkthrough when something went sideways./lobster-upgrade— full upgrade lifecycle with backup, smoke tests, and patch reapplication.
Knowledge capture
The capture surface is intentionally thin: dump extracts and stashes a single file in inbox/, and the nightly Daily Brief does the actual synthesis. No more hand-maintained wiki, no more cross-linking on capture — the LLM loop decides what’s worth promoting.
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| dump | Slash + agent | Quick-capture a URL, podcast, image, or block of text into inbox/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md. URLs extract via trafilatura, podcasts via the podcast-transcript wrapper, images get an OCR companion note, plain text passes through. One file per capture, no wiki maintenance. The Daily Brief loop routes promotable content overnight via codex-knowledge-llm. |
| codex-knowledge-llm | Agent | Source routing for inbox captures. Reads the kit’s source-routing.md conventions and produces an Original + Index pair plus a route-specific note: Structure Teardown for persuasive posts, Implementation Notes for tutorials, Concept Synthesis for transcripts, Book Notes for books. Invoked by the Daily Brief or directly when the agent decides a capture is worth promoting. |
| pp-x-twitter | Agent | Wraps the x-twitter-pp-cli from Printing Press — bookmarks, tweet lookup, user lookup, OAuth refresh. Used by the daily X-bookmarks ingest and any ad-hoc X queries. Read-only OAuth scopes by default. |
| trafilatura | Agent | Clean article-text extraction from arbitrary web pages. The engine behind dump and the daily podcast. |
| youtube-transcript | Agent | Pulls full captions for YouTube videos (free) instead of paying for Whisper transcription. Used by dump when the URL is a YouTube link. |
| obsidian | Agent | Reads from and writes into the shared Obsidian vault — daily notes, source notes, inbox entries. The agent’s main filesystem for long-form text. |
Audio and voice
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| save-to-spotify | Slash + agent | Produces polished audio episodes with TTS narration, chapter markers, in-player images, and a cover, then uploads to a private Spotify show. Powers the daily Instapaper podcast. |
| talk | Slash | Voice mode — converse with Lobster over a phone call instead of by text. See Talk Mode. |
Hospitality and errands
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| restaurant | Agent | Books and queries reservations across Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms. Handles snipe jobs for hard-to-book restaurants. See Restaurant Reservations. |
Home and household
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| sonos | Agent | Multi-room Sonos control: play/pause/skip, per-room volume, Spotify and Apple Music sources. Triggered by natural language. |
| eightctl | Agent | Eight Sleep base control — temperature setpoints, schedules, Away mode. Used by the Eight Sleep Away workflow when the household is traveling. |
| findmy | Agent | Apple FindMy lookups for people and devices. Powers location-aware automations. |
| apple-pim | Agent | Calendars, reminders, and contacts via local iCloud. The agent’s hands for Apple PIM. |
Travel
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| travel-hub | Agent | Unified read/write surface across trips, flights, hotels, ground transport, NetJets, and Exclusive Resorts. The agent consults this when answering “what flights does my partner have this week?” or when a webhook fires for a flight-status change. |
Curated discovery
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| seattle-events | Agent | Curated database of upcoming concerts, comedy, theater, and sports events in the local area. Powers the monthly events email digest. |
| office-quotes | Agent | Occasional levity. The agent will pull a contextually relevant quote from a small curated set when the moment calls for it. |
Channel and health diagnostics
These are loaded by the agent but tend to fire from cron or in response to incident triggers rather than from a natural-language request.
| Skill | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| bluebubbles-health | Agent | Inbound-channel diagnostic, retained from the BlueBubbles era for compatibility. Most channel debugging now lives under /lobster-imessage and /lobster-whatsapp. |
| cron | Agent | Internal helper for inspecting and reasoning about cron job state. Exposed to the agent for context, not invoked directly. |
| instapaper-podcast | Agent | The orchestrator behind the Daily Instapaper Podcast workflow. |
Where skills live on disk
| Surface | Path |
|---|---|
| Claude Code slash commands (laptop) | ~/.claude/skills/ |
| Lobster agent capabilities (host) | ~/.openclaw/skills/ |
| Per-agent workspace overrides | ~/.openclaw/agents/<id>/workspace/skills/ |
Workspace skills take highest precedence, then user-global, then plugin-bundled.
Adding a new skill
Skills are markdown files with YAML frontmatter and (usually) helper scripts in the same folder. The minimum is a SKILL.md with name and description. See the OpenClaw skill development docs at https://docs.openclaw.ai or use the /plugin-dev:skill-development skill in Claude Code for guided creation.