Collection review

Collection review

In auto mode, the Gateway maintains one weekly automation per agent. It is a normal isolated agent turn: cron owns scheduling, cancellation, and run history. propose and off disable these reviews.

The reviewer reads and edits the agent's Workshop directory with normal file tools. Directory listings are paged to fit the selected model instead of putting every file path into the initial prompt. The reviewer follows each continuation before changing that directory. Skill contents are review material, not active instructions. It keeps useful procedures, simplifies bloated skills, consolidates overlap, and removes obsolete files. Absence of use in the current run never justifies removal. Usage tracking and experience review remain active; weekly cleanup does not receive a separate usage table.

The file tools stay rooted at the Workshop directory. Shell commands use the operator's existing cron execution and approval policy; enabling review does not grant additional shell access. An approval-required policy can refuse unattended shell commands; a full-access policy permits them. File discovery does not need a shell.

Reviews support the embedded runtime and CLI runtimes that declare instruction isolation, disable their native tools, and use only the Gateway's restricted OpenClaw tool set, including Claude CLI. These CLI reviews retain the host-selected instruction snapshot; Workshop skill contents remain review material. OpenClaw carries the Workshop file root and prepared sandbox to the mediated tools. Changing the CLI working directory alone does not provide containment.

Runtimes without those guarantees, including undeclared CLI backends, the Codex harness, and node-placed CLI execution, remain unsupported for rooted reviews and fail with an explanation. If an enabled sandbox has workspaceAccess: "ro" or "none", the turn refuses to run rather than editing a disposable copy. A writable sandbox uses the agent's Workshop directory. Sandbox backends must support directory reads to provide shell-free discovery. Bundled backends use their existing filesystem permissions for these reads.

Changes and recovery

Collection review follows normal agent file-edit semantics. Completed edits remain if a later step fails or the turn is cancelled. There is no collection-wide transaction, post-turn scanner, automatic rollback, or separate review history writer. This also prevents a failed review from restoring an old tree over concurrent operator edits. Per-skill proposal validation, scanning, and apply behavior described in How Skill Workshop works are unchanged.

The reviewer ends with a summary of changes and removal reasons, or why no change was needed. Find it in the automation's run history. Reviews do not announce into a conversation. Future sessions load changed skills; running sessions retain their existing instruction snapshot.

Existing collection backups are preserved. The restore_collection action can restore a retained backup from the previous review implementation, but new reviews do not create collection backups. The history action reads those historical review records; current results belong to automation history. Restore refuses to overwrite affected skills changed after that backup.

When an older backup cannot be restored automatically

Restore also refuses when it cannot completely read the included content in a current result tree or its saved original, including content beyond sixteen path components. This leaves the current skill files and retained backup intact. Older backups may contain hashes that omitted deeper files, so deleting that content from the current tree cannot make the backup verifiable. A skill dropped by the cleanup can still be restored to its absent path, including deep support files. Do not edit backup hashes or delete or flatten live files merely to make restore pass.

For operator-led recovery:

1. Pause writes to the agent's Workshop, including collection review, before comparing or restoring files.
2. Locate the backup under <agentDir>/skill-workshop/collection-backups/<backup-id>/. Its manifest.json identifies the affected Workshop-relative directories in skillDirs and resultSkillDirs.
3. Create a new private inspection directory outside the Workshop and state directory. Copy the entire backup directory, including manifest.json and all saved content, into it. Current backups use skills/; history-only imports use history/workspace/. Separately copy each existing affected current directory into a current/ subtree, preserving its Workshop-relative path. Include hidden files and all nested content. If any file cannot be copied, stop rather than use a partial copy.
4. Compare the inspection copies to select the intended content. Keep the live tree and original backup unchanged during review, and retain unedited copies of both versions before carrying out any operator-approved recovery.

Retained legacy backups may instead live under <state-dir>/skill-workshop/collection-backups/<workspace-hash>/<backup-id>/ and contain a workspace/ subtree. Preserve that original layout in inspection copies; do not rewrite the manifest to make an old backup look current.