skill-cleaner

Skill Cleaner

Use this when trimming skill prompt budget, finding duplicate skills, auditing enabled/disabled skill roots, or deciding which skills/plugins to remove.

Workflow

1. Run the analyzer from this skill directory or repo root:

node --experimental-strip-types skills/skill-cleaner/scripts/skill-cleaner.ts --months 3

Useful variants:

node --experimental-strip-types skills/skill-cleaner/scripts/skill-cleaner.ts

2. Read the report in this order:

• Skill Budget: live Codex inventory, 2% budget, budgeted usage, and full-description pressure.
• Description candidates: long descriptions where relaxed grammar saves prompt budget.
• Duplicates: same skill name or near-identical description/body across Codex, plugin cache, repo siblings, and personal skill roots.
• Unused candidates: no recent user mention or actual SKILL.md read in recent Codex/OpenClaw logs.
• Root summary: where skills came from and whether config marks them disabled.

3. Before deleting or editing:

• Verify the kept copy exists and is loaded.
• Prefer deleting repo-local or agent-scripts duplicates when Codex built-ins cover them.
• Keep repo-local OpenClaw maintainer skills when they encode repo policy or live operations.
• Preserve trigger nouns in descriptions: product, tool, action, object.

Analyzer Notes

• By default, codex debug prompt-input supplies the exact model-visible skill list, order, names, and aliased paths. --no-live forces the broader filesystem fallback.
• The broad filesystem scan remains for duplicate, disabled, and archived-cache diagnostics; it is not treated as the loaded inventory.
• The script mirrors Codex's model-visible line shape: - name: description (file: path).
• It applies Codex-like frontmatter rules: YAML frontmatter only, default name from parent dir, single-line sanitized name and description.
• It follows Codex core-skills/src/render.rs: 2% of raw context_window, token cost ceil(utf8_bytes / 4), then full descriptions -> equal description truncation -> omitted minimum lines. Alias-table line cost is included.
• It reads ~/.codex/models_cache.json for GPT-5.5 context_window; fallback is 272,000 tokens and 2%.
• It scans only normal Codex/plugin/repo skill roots by default. Extra folders such as Dropbox archives are included only with --root <path>.
• --root-only requires at least one --root <path>, skips the live Codex inventory, and scans only those supplied roots.
• It realpath-dedupes roots, so symlinked roots such as ~/.codex/skills/agent-scripts -> ~/Projects/agent-scripts/skills do not create false duplicates.
• For duplicate names, it reports description/body similarity and suggests deletion candidates only when bodies are near copies. Keep priority defaults to direct Codex system skills, then direct Codex skills, then plugin skills, then personal/repo copies.
• It scans ~/.codex/history.jsonl and recent ~/.codex/sessions/**/*.jsonl by default. Add --deep-logs for archived sessions and common OpenClaw/Clawd log folders.
• Usage evidence is heuristic: user $skill/use skill mentions and paths observed in tool-call arguments.

Output Policy

• Suggest first; edit only when the user asks.
• If asked to apply cleanup, make small grouped commits: descriptions, deletes, config disables.
• Do not delete ignored/untracked skill dirs without naming the destination or confirming they are disposable.