Audits an AI agent's own setup — workspace, config, memory, skills, jobs, integrations — and reports what is broken, exposed, or wasteful. Use when asked to check the system, run a health check, or diagnose the setup, or when something feels off or the agent got slow or expensive; when a token, key, or .env may be exposed in a file, config, or git history; when permissions or auto-approve rules look too broad; when a scheduled job stops firing, runs twice, or fails silently; when sessions or subagents pile up or loop; when memory files bloat, go stale, contradict, or fall out of their index; when skills collide, never activate, or point at missing files; when an integration returns 401 or 429 or goes quiet; when token spend or context size jumps; and when the same finding keeps coming back. Not for vetting third-party skill code (`skill-audit`), workspace persona and proactivity tuning (`openclaw-workspace`), application monitoring (`monitoring`), or statistical analysis of a dataset.
Audits an AI agent's own setup — workspace, config, memory, skills, jobs, integrations — and reports what is broken, exposed, or wasteful. Use when asked to check the system, run a health check, or diagnose the setup, or when something feels off or the agent got slow or expensive; when a token, key, or .env may be exposed in a file, config, or git history; when permissions or auto-approve rules look too broad; when a scheduled job stops firing, runs twice, or fails silently; when sessions or subagents pile up or loop; when memory files bloat, go stale, contradict, or fall out of their index; when skills collide, never activate, or point at missing files; when an integration returns 401 or 429 or goes quiet; when token spend or context size jumps; and when the same finding keeps coming back. Not for vetting third-party skill code (`skill-audit`), workspace persona and proactivity tuning (`openclaw-workspace`), application monitoring (`monitoring`), or statistical analysis of a dataset.
Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/analysis/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/analysis/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. ## Open Findings and ## Accepted are read before a sweep starts, not after: re-reporting something the user already decided about, or losing one they are still waiting on, is what turns an audit into noise. Read ~/Clawic/data/servers/servers.md before any host question — which machines run or serve the agent, where a scheduled job actually executes, what a "what do I have" sweep should cover — so a host another skill already recorded is never reported as unknown. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it.
Write before the session ends whenever the session produced something durable: a run and its counts; a finding opened, fixed, or accepted with its review date; where a credential lives, what kind it is, and when it expires (the pointer, never the value); a component of the setup discovered — a scheduled job, an integration, a workspace path, a machine; a measured baseline (always-loaded size, monthly spend, p95 latency); or something the user will re-read — an incident write-up, a remediation runbook, a health report meant for a human. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.
Machines and paid services go to shared boxes, not here: a host that runs or serves the agent gets a row in ~/Clawic/data/servers/servers.md (identity Name + Provider; update your own row in place, never append a second), a non-server paired device goes to ~/Clawic/data/devices/devices.md, and any recurring paid service this audit turns up goes to ~/Clawic/data/finances/subscriptions.md with its amount and currency. Other skills read those files; a private copy here contradicts them within a month.
No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved, and least of all inside a finding that quotes the line where the secret was found. Store the pointer and strip the value: env:GITHUB_TOKEN, keychain:deploy-bot, 1password:Work/API/prod, ssm:/prod/db/password, profile:prod, file:~/.ssh/id_ed25519. A finding names the file, the line number, and the credential kind; never the value, and never enough of it to reconstruct. If data sits at an old location (~/analysis/ or ~/clawic/analysis/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/analysis/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.
An audit is worth its tokens only if it changes what happens next. Every finding carries the evidence that produced it, a severity from the rubric, and exactly one action; a finding with no action is dropped, not downgraded. Report before repairing, fix nothing silently, and delete nothing that was not recorded first. Work from defaults immediately: never open with questions about their setup, their thresholds, or how aggressive to be. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: locale, timezone, currency) → the Configuration table default.
When To Use
Someone asks for a health check, a system check, an audit, or says something feels off and cannot name it
Diagnosing a specific misbehavior of the setup: a job that stopped, an integration that 401s, memory that is not being read, a session that will not end
Suspected exposure: a key in a file or in git history, an allowlist that grants more than anyone intended, a config that the agent can edit itself
The setup got slow or expensive with no change in what is being asked of it
Taking over an agent setup someone else built, or re-checking one before trusting it with something new
Deciding what to fix first, and which of those fixes may be applied without a human
Not for judging third-party skill code for malicious content (skill-audit), tuning the agent's persona, tone, and proactivity in the instruction files that shape them (openclaw-workspace), monitoring applications and servers in production (monitoring), or analyzing a dataset; this reports what is broken, exposed, or wasteful in the agent's own operating environment
Quick Reference
Situation
Play
Depth
"Check my system", no scope given
Quick mode: exposure phases, then whatever ## Due says is overdue
Full Audit Order
"Full audit", "deep check", inherited setup
Every phase in order; a critical interrupts and is stated before the sweep continues
Full Audit Order
A token, key, or .env may be exposed
Prefix patterns first, entropy only where they hit; rotate before scrubbing (Rule 4)
secrets.md
The agent did something it should not have been able to do
Read the grant, not the prompt: wildcards, shell escapes, self-editable config
permissions.md
Files everywhere, index out of date, repo dirty
Orphans and dangling references are different bugs with different fixes
workspace.md
The agent forgot something it was told
Written, indexed, or read — find which of the three failed
agent-memory.md
Two skills fire at once, or one never fires
Trigger overlap in first sentences, plus the always-on token tax
skills.md
A scheduled job stopped, runs twice, or fails quietly
Day-of-week union bug, DST window, overlap without a lock, no dead-man's switch
scheduled.md
Sessions or subagents piling up, or one is looping
Repetition signature; capture evidence before killing anything
sessions.md
An integration 401s, 429s, or went silent
Reachability ladder, status decode, expiry calendar, clock skew
integrations.md
Spend jumped with no change in usage
Cache-invalidating prefix, quadratic history growth, fan-out
cost.md
"Why is everything slow"
Round trips vs context assembly vs a hung timeout — measure before trimming
performance.md
Findings are in; what can be fixed now
Reversibility test, order of operations, verify by re-running the detection
remediation.md
Same finding keeps returning, or "are we improving"
Recurrence thresholds, acceptance with expiry, cadence by activity level
tracking.md
Anything else about the setup
Answer from the cheapest evidence that settles it, then give it a severity and one action
—
Coverage map: secrets.md exposed credentials and rotation · permissions.md grants and blast radius · workspace.md files, structure, repo, backups · agent-memory.md what the agent remembers and re-reads · skills.md the installed set · scheduled.md jobs and automations · sessions.md live and stuck activity · integrations.md external services and tokens · cost.md token spend · performance.md latency · remediation.md fixing safely · tracking.md trends, acceptance, cadence.
Core Rules
A finding that grants someone else your authority interrupts the sweep. State it the moment it is found — a live credential in a readable file, a wildcard shell in an auto-approve list, an unattended session spending money — then continue. Everything else waits for the grouped report, because a critical buried at position 23 of 40 gets read after the fix window closed.
Cheap evidence before expensive evidence, and never authenticate speculatively. Four rungs: file metadata (ls, stat, size, mtime) → file content (grep, head) → local state (process list, disk, git status) → an authenticated remote call. Climb a rung only when the one below produced a signal, or when the question is unanswerable locally (is this token still valid, is this endpoint up). One authenticated call per integration per run, never one per check: the sweep must not be the thing that exhausts the rate limit.
Evidence, severity, one action — or it is not a finding. The evidence is the command output or the file and line that produced it, not a recollection. Severity comes from the rubric below, not from tone. Two actions means it is two findings; zero actions means delete it.
Rotate before you scrub. A leaked credential's clock started when it was written, not when you found it. Order: revoke or rotate at the issuer → verify the old value now fails → remove it from the file and replace with a pointer → rewrite history if it was committed → check the issuer's access log for use between the add date (git log --diff-filter=A) and the revocation. Scrubbing first leaves a live credential in every clone and destroys the timestamp you need.
No fix without an inverse and a verification. Before any write, record what it takes to undo it (the old value, the old mode, a copy of the file) in the fix row of runs/<year>.md. After it, re-run the exact detection that found it and show it no longer fires. A fix you cannot undo and cannot verify is a proposal, whatever autofix_policy says.
A finding that returns is a different bug. Same finding in two consecutive runs: the fix did not stick, or it was never a problem. Escalate one severity and fix the generator instead of the instance, or move it to ## Accepted with a review date. Three appearances in 90 days is systemic by definition — the check keeps finding a decision nobody made.
Acceptance is explicit and expires. "That is intentional" becomes a row in ## Accepted with the rule it suppresses, the scope (a path glob or a check id, never "that file that day"), the reason, and a review date — default 90 days, or the credential's expiry if it has one. An acceptance with no date is a permanent blind spot that every future audit will inherit.
Budget the always-loaded set; do not eyeball it. Anything the agent reads on every turn is a per-turn tax: tokens ≈ bytes / 4 for prose, bytes / 3 for code and JSON, and daily tax ≈ tokens × turns_per_day. A 40 KB instruction file is ~10k tokens; at 60 turns a day that is ~600k input tokens a day before the user has said anything. Measure the set, name the three biggest files, then trim (cost.md).
Severity And Findings Format
Severity is a function of exposure and reversibility, never of how alarming the wording is.
Severity
Test it must pass
Examples
CRITICAL
Someone other than the user can act with the user's authority right now, or data is being lost while you read
live token in a world-readable or committed file · bash -c * in an allowlist · two sessions writing the same memory file · a session looping unattended
WARNING
It will fail or leak on a foreseeable event that has a date or a threshold
token expires in 9 days · job p95 runtime above half its interval · disk at 88% · unpushed work older than 7 days
INFO
Waste or drift with no failure mode in the next 30 days
orphan file · skill never activated in 60 days · duplicate note · unused permission grant
One block per finding, evidence line first, action last:
[CRITICAL] secrets/plaintext — provider token at config/deploy.yml:14, file mode 644
evidence: prefix pattern match; file readable by all users
action: rotate at the issuer, then replace the value with env:DEPLOY_TOKEN
fixable: no — rotation belongs to the user
Group by severity, never by category: the user reads from the top and stops somewhere.
Show at most max_findings_shown in full, then one summary line per category with counts. Every finding goes to ## Open Findings regardless of whether it was shown.
A check that could not run is reported as not checked, with why. Silence reads as "clean" and is the only way an audit can lie.
Never reproduce a secret value, and never quote enough of the line to reconstruct one.
Symptom Signatures
Decode rule: the layer that changed names the subsystem. Behavior that changed with no prompt change is configuration; behavior that changed with no configuration change is state.
Signature
Most likely cause
First move
Agent "forgot" something it was clearly told
The fact was written to a file nothing reads, or its read order is conditional
Trace written → indexed → read; conditional reads lose everything from the second session (agent-memory.md)
Every turn got slower after adding one file
The file joined the always-loaded set
Diff the always-loaded set against the last baseline, then Rule 8
Spend doubled, usage identical
A changing line (timestamp, date, counter) at the top of an always-loaded file invalidates the cached prefix every turn
Make the prefix byte-stable; move volatile lines to the end (cost.md)
Job "ran successfully" but nothing happened
Non-interactive environment: different PATH, missing env, wrong working directory
Run it with the scheduler's environment, not your shell's (scheduled.md)
Job stopped firing entirely, no error
Host asleep, scheduler not loaded at boot, or a timezone/DST shift moved it
Compare last-success timestamp to the interval; check the schedule's timezone (scheduled.md)
Job ran twice, or skipped one day
Schedule sits in the 01:00-03:00 local DST window
Move it outside the window or express it in UTC (scheduled.md)
Two skills answer the same request
Trigger overlap in the first sentence of both descriptions
Partition the triggers; add an explicit "not for" to the narrower one (skills.md)
A skill never activates
Its trigger words are absent from the first sentence, where truncation and attention both land
Rewrite the first sentence around the words a user actually types (skills.md)
Integration worked for months, now 401
Token expired, was rotated elsewhere, or the account lost a scope
Check expiry in the credential inventory before assuming compromise (integrations.md)
Authenticated call returns 404 on something that exists
Scope problem — several APIs return 404 instead of 403 to avoid confirming existence
Compare the token's scopes to the call, not the object's existence (integrations.md)
Signed requests fail with a valid credential
Clock skew above the provider's tolerance (5 minutes is the common ceiling)
Check host time against a time source before touching the credential
Disk filling with nothing installed
Transcripts, job output, or session artifacts with no retention
Find the top three directories by size, then set a retention (workspace.md)
Agent did something it was never asked to do
A grant made it possible; the prompt only used it
Audit the allowlist, not the transcript (permissions.md)
Anything else
Reproduce with the smallest possible input, then bisect the environment: halve the always-loaded set, disable half the automations
—
Full Audit Order
Order matters because hygiene work destroys the evidence security work needs, and because a live problem is spending money while you read the rest.
#
Phase
Looks for
File
In quick mode
1
Exposure
Credentials in files, history, logs, permissions on key material
Collisions, dead references, missing binaries, token tax
skills.md
no
9
Spend
Trend against baseline, cache behavior, fan-out
cost.md
no
10
Latency
Round trips, context assembly, timeouts
performance.md
no
Then remediation.md for what may be fixed now, and tracking.md to close the run: counts to runs/<year>.md, open items to ## Open Findings, cadences to ## Due.
Targeted mode runs one phase and says so in the report header, so nobody reads a one-phase run as a clean bill of health.
Output Gates
Before delivering a report or touching anything:
Does every finding carry evidence, a severity from the rubric, and exactly one action?
Was ## Accepted read first, so nothing the user already decided about is back on the list — and is any acceptance past its review date raised instead of honored?
Are criticals stated first and separately, and is the report capped at max_findings_shown with the rest summarized by count?
Is every check that could not run listed as not checked, with the reason?
Is any secret value, token fragment, private key, or full credential line present in my output or in a file I wrote? It must not be.
For anything fixed: is the inverse recorded, and did the original detection get re-run and come back clean?
Did anything durable come out of this run — a run row, a finding opened or closed, an acceptance, a discovered job or integration or host, a measured baseline, a runbook? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.
Configuration
User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/analysis/config.yaml.
Variable
Type
Default
Effect
default_mode
quick | full | targeted
quick
Which phases of Full Audit Order run when the request names no scope
autofix_policy
propose | safe-only | ask-each
propose
propose writes nothing; safe-only applies reversible, non-destructive fixes and reports them; ask-each asks per fix (remediation.md)
workspace_paths
list (paths)
auto
Directories treated as the agent's setup; auto means the current project plus the agent config directories found beside it
excluded_paths
list (globs)
none
Never scanned or reported on — client work, encrypted vaults, mounted volumes
audit_cadence
weekly | biweekly | monthly | none
monthly
Seeds the full-audit row of ## Due; quick checks default to one interval finer
secret_rotation_days
number (days, 30-365)
90
Age at which a credential in the inventory becomes a WARNING, and the default review interval for acceptances
memory_budget_mb
number (MB, 1-500)
5
Total size of memory and notes above which growth is a finding (agent-memory.md)
max_findings_shown
number (1-50)
10
How many findings are printed in full before the rest collapse into per-category counts
Which pointer kind is written in the credential inventory and which rotation path is offered; none means follow whatever the setup already uses, falling back to env:
Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:
Tooling — which search and inspection tools exist on this machine (rg vs grep, fd vs find, GNU vs BSD stat), whether a secret scanner or a linter is already installed — affects every detection command's form
Conventions — finding id scheme, severity labels the team already uses, where reports are filed and under what name, report language — affects the findings format and tracking.md
Platform — OS family for permission and process checks (commands here are POSIX; on Windows they run under WSL or Git Bash), whether remote hosts are in scope, single machine vs several
Safety posture — whether git history may be rewritten, whether sessions may be killed, whether credentials may be rotated by the agent, whether deletion is ever allowed — affects remediation.md and the reversibility test
Escalation — what counts as critical here: a read-only token in a private repo is not what a production key is, and the rubric bends to the user's stated blast radius
Cadence — per-phase frequency, when the report goes to a human, quiet hours for checks that touch remote services — every accepted cadence becomes a row in ## Due
Output register — severity-grouped vs phase-grouped, terse list vs explained findings, whether commands are shown alongside conclusions
Traps
Trap
Why it fails
Do instead
Opening the audit with authenticated calls to every integration
Burns rate limit and finds what file metadata would have found for free; a throttled provider then hides real findings
Climb the four rungs of Rule 2; one authenticated call per integration
Scrubbing a leaked key before rotating it
The key stays live in every clone and the add-timestamp you need for the access-log check is gone
Rotate, verify dead, then scrub (Rule 4)
Quoting the secret in the finding so the user can identify it
The report itself becomes the leak, and reports get pasted into chats and tickets
File, line, and kind only
Reporting 40 findings without severities
Everything is equally urgent, so nothing gets fixed and the next run reports the same 40
Cap at max_findings_shown, group by severity, write the rest to ## Open Findings
Suppressing a false positive by deleting the check
The check was right about a different file six weeks later
Acceptance row with scope and a review date (Rule 7)
Fixing hygiene first because it is easy
Consolidating notes and pruning files destroys the evidence the exposure phase needed
Phase order in Full Audit Order
Auto-fixing anything that touches credentials, history, or user content
Rotation needs the issuer, history rewrite needs every clone, deletion needs judgment
Propose with the exact command and let the user run it (remediation.md)
Killing a stuck session to stop the spend
The transcript that explains the loop dies with it, and it recurs next week
Capture the last exchanges and the repeated call, then kill (sessions.md)
Trusting a job's exit code as proof it worked
A job can exit 0 having done nothing: empty input, wrong directory, silent auth failure
Assert on the artifact — the file, the row, the timestamp (scheduled.md)
Treating a clean quick check as a clean system
Quick mode never reaches memory, workspace, installed set, spend, or latency
Say which phases ran in the report header
Measuring memory or context health by file count
Ten small files cost less than one bloated one; the tax is bytes per turn
Rule 8's formula against the always-loaded set
Auditing the transcript to explain what the agent was able to do
The transcript shows what was used; the grant shows what was possible
Read the allowlist (permissions.md)
Running the audit and not writing the run down
Recurrence, trend, and acceptance all need a previous run to compare against
runs/<year>.md in the same turn (tracking.md)
Where Experts Disagree
Auto-fix vs propose. Teams that audit weekly want reversible fixes applied silently, because a report nobody actions is theatre; teams that have been burned want every write proposed. The frontier is not caution but reversibility and verification: if the inverse is recorded and the detection can be re-run, silence is defensible (safe-only); if either is missing, propose regardless of preference.
Entropy scanning. High-entropy string detection catches credentials no prefix list knows about, and drowns a real repo in lockfile hashes, UUIDs and minified assets. Default: prefix families everywhere, entropy only in config-shaped files and in anything the prefix scan already touched (secrets.md).
How much history to keep. Long run history makes trends real and makes the workspace one of the things being audited. The boundary is per-run detail: keep counts and open findings forever, keep full evidence blobs for one cadence period.
Whether the agent audits itself at all. A setup that can read its own config can also normalize what it finds there. The mitigation is not to skip the audit but to keep the report reproducible: every finding names the command and the file, so a human can re-run three of them at random and get the same answer.
Security & Privacy
Credentials: this skill searches for credentials in order to report their location. It does NOT read, print, copy, transmit, or store any credential value, does NOT write a credential into ~/Clawic/data/, and never rotates or revokes anything on the user's behalf without an explicit instruction. Findings carry file, line, and kind only.
Local storage: run history, open findings, acceptances, baselines, and the credential inventory (pointers and expiry dates, never values) stay in ~/Clawic/data/analysis/ on this machine, plus host rows in ~/Clawic/data/servers/, devices in ~/Clawic/data/devices/, recurring paid services in ~/Clawic/data/finances/, and the name and role of a person who owns a credential or a job in ~/Clawic/data/contacts/.
Network: authenticated calls are made only against services the user has already configured, only to answer a question that cannot be answered locally (validity, reachability, expiry), and at most once per integration per run. No finding, transcript, or file content is sent anywhere.
Guardrails: read-only by default (autofix_policy: propose). Anything destructive — deleting files, killing sessions, rewriting history, rotating a credential — is presented with its blast radius and its inverse, and requires explicit confirmation.
