Agent Development

Overview

Agent Development is an OpenClaw skill that provides a structured development checklist and prompt guidance for building AI agents. It focuses on breaking agent work into clear steps, defining objectives, planning, and implementing code changes with validation. The documentation emphasizes a disciplined workflow that includes understanding requirements, creating a plan, coding, testing, and reviewing outputs. The goal is to make agent driven development more reliable and repeatable.

What This Skill Is Good For

Use this skill when you are building or modifying an agent or a tool that will be used by agents. It helps you structure the development process, avoid missing requirements, and reduce errors. It is also useful as a template for prompting an agent to implement features in a consistent manner. If you want a repeatable checklist for software tasks performed by an agent, this skill gives you that structure.

Core Principles

The documentation emphasizes a few core principles:

• Start by restating the requirements and constraints in plain language.
• Identify the key files, modules, and entry points before changing code.
• Create a step by step plan for changes before you implement them.
• Validate work with tests or verification steps.
• Provide a concise summary of changes and next steps when done.

These principles are designed to mirror a careful human development process while keeping an agent focused.

Planning and Task Decomposition

Agent Development highlights the importance of breaking large requests into smaller tasks. It encourages creating a short plan that lists discrete steps, then updating the plan as progress is made. This makes it easier to track what has been completed and what remains. The plan should be explicit about which files or components will be touched and what outcomes are expected for each step.

The documentation also advises skipping planning for trivial tasks, while still documenting a plan for multi step changes. This keeps the workflow lightweight when the change is simple and more structured when the change is complex.

Implementation Guidance

The skill stresses clarity and discipline during implementation. It recommends:

• Review the relevant files before making changes.
• Prefer small, focused edits over large refactors.
• Keep changes localized to the required files.
• Add comments only where they explain non obvious behavior.

This guidance is intended to reduce regressions and keep changes easy to review.

Testing and Validation

Agent Development encourages running tests or validation commands whenever possible. It also suggests noting when tests could not be run and providing instructions for how to run them. This matches standard engineering practices and helps maintainers trust changes made by an agent.

If no automated tests exist, the documentation suggests describing manual verification steps or providing a short checklist. That way the outcome can still be validated by a human.

Error Handling and Edge Cases

The documentation includes guidance on handling errors and edge cases. It encourages anticipating common failure modes and validating inputs. If a task involves external APIs or system dependencies, the skill suggests handling missing configuration or network errors gracefully. These checks help prevent fragile automation.

Communication and Summaries

When the work is done, the skill recommends delivering a concise summary of changes. The summary should describe what was changed, why it was changed, and where the changes are located. It should also include next steps such as tests to run or areas to review. This summary is intended to support quick review and reduce back and forth.

The guidance also recommends keeping the tone concise and professional, and aligning with the team's formatting preferences. This helps integrate agent output into normal engineering review workflows.

Example Workflow

A typical workflow using this skill would look like:

1. Read the request and restate it in simple terms.
2. Identify relevant files and dependencies.
3. Write a plan with discrete steps.
4. Implement changes step by step.
5. Run tests or verify manually.
6. Summarize changes and provide next steps.

This flow mirrors standard development practice and helps ensure quality.

Maintenance and Iteration

The documentation also notes that skills and prompts evolve. When a workflow changes, update the documentation rather than adding ad hoc guidance. This keeps the development checklist current and ensures new agents follow the correct process.

Summary

Agent Development provides a structured, process driven checklist for agent based software work. It emphasizes planning, scoped edits, validation, and clear summaries. By using these guidelines, teams can improve the reliability of agent generated changes and make the development process more predictable.

Prompt Structure and Inputs

The skill documentation also stresses that prompt inputs should be explicit. It recommends providing goals, constraints, and acceptance criteria up front. This helps the agent understand what success looks like and reduces the risk of partial implementations. It also encourages listing any required interfaces, example inputs, or expected outputs when those are available. When a task includes file changes, it suggests calling out the file paths so the agent can focus its search and avoid unnecessary edits.

Scope Control

Another theme in the documentation is scope control. The guidance suggests avoiding large refactors unless the task explicitly demands them. It also recommends not changing files that are unrelated to the request, and keeping changes narrowly scoped to the requested feature or bug fix. This reduces the chance of regressions and keeps reviews focused.

Summary

Agent Development provides a disciplined framework for agent driven software changes. It covers requirement restatement, planning, scoped implementation, validation, and clear communication. By following this structure, teams can improve the reliability of automated coding workflows and reduce the time required for review.