My OpenClaw agent wouldn't stay autonomous. Here's what fixed it.

If you’ve set up automations in OpenClaw and they worked for a few hours then stopped silently, this is for you. The agent forgets its instructions, cron jobs show up empty, and you end up babysitting something that was supposed to be autonomous. I had the same problem. It took me a week of trial and error to get my agent to actually run on its own. If you’re hitting the same wall, here’s what fixed it for me. One thing before we start: don’t use OpenClaw to configure itself. Use Claude Code or any coding agent to write the skill files, the rules, the scripts. Then let OpenClaw execute them. OpenClaw is good at running systems but less at building them. Sometimes when I asked it to write its own config, something would be off or missing and I couldn’t figure out why. Building the files externally and dropping them into the workspace was just more predictable. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The skill file Chat instructions don’t persist.