Delivery

Authoring and approving a skill makes it active. Delivery is the separate question of how that active skill gets in front of a running agent. There are two tiers, with very different reliability — and both serve active-only once Skill Factory is enabled.

Tier 1 — MCP pull

The agent fetches skills itself through the memclaw_doc tool:

• op=search collection='skills' — semantic search over skill summary embeddings.
• op=query collection='skills' — structured (filter-based) retrieval over the collection, no embedding needed.
• op=read collection='skills' doc_id=<slug> — fetch a specific skill.

When skills_factory.enabled is on, the server enforces active-only on this path, with no way for the caller to widen it:

• read of a non-active skill → 404 (no existence leak).
• query / search → status='active' is forced; a caller-supplied status is rejected (422).
• Filtering respects tenant ownership (no cross-tenant bleed).

This tier is probabilistic: the agent has to decide to look, and search has to surface the right skill. Good for discovery; not a guarantee the agent will use a given skill.

Tier 2 — OpenClaw push

The OpenClaw plugin reconciler removes the discovery step. On each heartbeat it calls:

POST /api/v1/skills/installable   { tenant_id, fleet_id?, limit }

and writes every returned skill to the node's managed skills directory as a SKILL.md, then (optionally) registers that directory on OpenClaw's skill load path. The agent sees the skill in its skill list without searching for it — reliable delivery. Details and configuration in OpenClaw plugin.

The endpoint is deliberately narrow and fail-safe:

• The collection is fixed to skills and the filter is server-decided — a harness cannot ask for non-active skills.
• Opted-in tenant → status='active' only. Not opted in → every visible skill (byte-identical to the legacy reconcile — the merge-day no-op).
• If the opt-in flag can't be read, the endpoint returns 503 rather than fall back to returning everything — an outage can never push a non-active skill.

Which tier do I get?

If your agents run under OpenClaw, the push tier is the dependable path; the pull tier is always available to any MCP client as a discovery surface.

Not the same thing: the bundled usage skill

Don't confuse Skill Factory delivery with the bundled usage skill installer:

• GET /api/v1/install-skill returns a one-liner that installs MemClaw's own usage guide (the memclaw skill, or company-brain) into Claude Code / Codex.
• GET /api/v1/skill/{name} serves those allowlisted static skills.

Those teach an agent how to use MemClaw; they are not catalog skills flowing through the Skill Factory lifecycle. See the OSS README "Install the skill" section for that installer.

Where to look in the source

• Push endpoint (/skills/installable) + active-only gate: core-api/src/core_api/routes/documents.py
• MCP pull filter (memclaw_doc over skills): core-api/src/core_api/mcp_server.py
• Reconciler (push): plugin/src/reconcile-skills.ts