The best OpenClaw skills to install first, with their security verdicts

Diali’s catalog holds more than four thousand OpenClaw and Hermes skills from the public registry, each with its own security review. Sorting by installs and reading the reviews gives a short list that most people can install on day one without regret. The install counts are the registry’s; the verdicts and summaries are Diali’s, and they are dated. The Diali skills catalog carries the full catalog.

Make the agent better at being an agent

• Self-improving agent (pskoett): captures learnings, errors and corrections so the assistant stops repeating a mistake. The most installed skill on the registry; the review notes it stores what it learns locally, which can include sensitive work, and calls it usable.
• Ontology (oswalpalash): a typed knowledge graph for structured memory, with people, projects, tasks and documents linked together. Reviewed clean; it persists what you give it, on purpose.
• Skill vetter (spclaudehome): a security-first checklist to run before installing any other skill. Reviewed clean, with no hidden execution; it is what the registry’s own users reach for.

Do real work

• GitHub (steipete): issues, pull requests, CI runs and API queries through the gh CLI. Clean; plain CLI guidance.
• Google Workspace CLI, gog (steipete): Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Contacts, Sheets and Docs. Clean; it needs your own OAuth setup, which is the right kind of friction.
• Notion (steipete): pages, databases and blocks through the Notion API. Clean; protect the token and be deliberate with commands that write.
• Obsidian (steipete): plain-Markdown vaults and automation through obsidian-cli. Clean, with a visible third-party CLI install you should trust-check first.

See, hear, write

• Weather (steipete): current conditions and forecasts with no API key. Clean, and a good first install to check that skills work at all.
• OpenAI Whisper (steipete): local speech to text through the Whisper CLI, no key. Clean; it discloses its model cache.
• Nano PDF (steipete): edit PDFs with natural-language instructions. Clean, with one caveat the review flags: it installs an unpinned external package.
• Humanizer (biostartechnology): strips the tells of machine-written text, based on Wikipedia’s guidance. Clean; it rewrites local documents and nothing else.
• Tavily search (jacky1n7): structured web search results, for both OpenClaw and Hermes. Clean; its network use matches its purpose.

Four of the skills above have their own pages in the catalog with the full review: Self-improving agent, Skill vetter, Obsidian and Humanizer.

What the list leaves out, and why

Several popular skills carry an unknown verdict today, which means the review has not completed, not that they failed: a proactive-agent framework, a multi-engine search skill, an auto-updater that changes your install nightly and a phone-calling skill among them. They may be fine. The list above is the set where the review has finished and came back clean, which is the honest bar. What is ClawHub explains what the registry’s own audit statuses mean.

Install only content you understand and trust.

Installing on Diali

Every skill page in the catalog shows the verdict, the review and the check date before the install button, the skill runs inside the assistant’s sandbox, and the keys a skill needs are set from the dashboard rather than in a config file. The counts and verdicts above are as of the day this post was written; the catalog is live. Hosted OpenClaw on Diali is where the assistant comes from.