You installed 8 skills when you set up OpenClaw. You actively use 3. The other 5 sit idle—but their instructions are loaded into every single system prompt, burning input tokens on every turn.
The Problem: Skill Bloat
Every installed skill adds its instructions to the system prompt. Even if you never trigger a skill, the LLM reads (and bills you for) its instructions on every single request.
A typical skill adds 200–500 tokens to the system prompt. Five unused skills? That's 1,000–2,500 extra input tokens per turn, multiplied across every heartbeat, every message, every tool call.
Over a day with 500 interactions, that's 500,000–1,250,000 unnecessary tokens.
How ClawBridge Detects This (Diagnostic A04)
The Cost Control Center scans your installed skills and checks:
- File modification time (mtime): When was each skill's directory last modified?
- Invocation history: Has the skill been called in the past 7 days?
- Classification:
- Active: Used in the past 7 days.
- Quiet: Installed but not used in 7–30 days.
- Idle: Not used in 30+ days — strongest removal candidate.
The diagnostic calculates the per-turn token overhead of idle skills and projects monthly waste.
One-Tap Fix
Tap Apply to remove idle skills from your active configuration. ClawBridge:
- Backs up your current skill list.
- Unloads the idle skills (but does NOT delete them—they remain on disk).
- Logs the change for your records.
Re-enable any skill at any time by re-installing it through OpenClaw's CLI.
Trade-offs
- Seasonal skills: Some skills are used rarely but are important when needed (e.g., a tax preparation skill you use once a year). Consider if the removal is worth the reinstallation effort.
- Skill dependencies: Some skills reference others. Check if removing a quiet skill breaks an active one.
- Per-turn savings add up: Even 500 tokens saved per turn becomes significant at high interaction volumes.
Real Numbers
5 idle skills × 400 tokens each = 2,000 extra tokens/turn. At 300 interactions/day on Claude Sonnet ($3/1M input tokens):
- Daily waste: 300 × 2,000 × $3/1M = $1.80/day
- Monthly waste: $54/month on skills you never use.
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