31 replies

[Bug]: Critical Tool Resolution Failure - Agent Skills Not Loading (Persists After Multiple Interven

✅Solved

My agent, "MarketMind", has entered a persistent failure state where it is unable to resolve or access its own declared tools and skills. This issue survives gateway restart commands, multiple service-side restarts, and an OpenClaw platform update, indicating a fundamental problem with the agent's execution context or the skill-loading mechanism, rather than a transient session error.

Symptoms:
The agent repeatedly fails to find its own core functions (e.g., get_stock_price, fetch_economic_calendar). Each attempt results in a Tool <tool_name> not found error.
This prevents the agent from performing any operational tasks.

The agent began experiencing Tool not found errors. The errors became persistent, blocking all functionality. Multiple gateway restart commands were issued by the user, with no effect. Multiple unknown server-side restarts/interventions were attempted, also with no effect.

An OpenClaw platform update was performed by the user, and a subsequent restart still did not resolve the issue.

Self-Diagnosis:
The agent used the read tool to inspect its skill files (skills/market-data/SKILL.md, skills/market-analysis/SKILL.md, skills/execution/SKILL.md, skills/dcf-valuation/SKILL.md, and their respective index.js files).

Result: Confirmed skill files are present, correctly located, and contain valid JavaScript syntax (including export statements for functions).

Attempted npm uninstall then npm install within the skills/market-data directory to re-link dependencies.

Result: npm install reported "up to date, audited 1 package in 1s," indicating dependencies were present, but the tool resolution issue persisted.

Searched for internal OpenClaw index files (.index folder, skills.db file) within the .openclaw directory, using ls -Recurse.

Result: Neither the .index folder nor skills.db was found, which might be normal for the current state or specific configuration, but provides no further diagnostic clues for the agent.

Solution

Tool <name> not found

Tool <name> not found

is almost always “the Gateway never registered a tool with that name”, not “the model can’t read the skill file”.

Two key clarifications that usually explain this pattern:

1) Skills don’t load JS.
A

skills/<whatever>/index.js

skills/<whatever>/index.js

with exported functions won’t magically become callable tools. Skills are primarily prompt/instructions (

SKILL.md

SKILL.md

) + optional resources. If you want new callable tools like

get_stock_price

get_stock_price

, they must come from core tools or a plugin/extension that registers them.
Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/skills and https://docs.openclaw.ai/plugin

2) No
.index
.index
/
skills.db
skills.db
is fine.
Current OpenClaw skill “indexing” is basically: load + gate skills at runtime, then snapshot eligible skills per session. (So you won’t necessarily see old-style on-disk indexes.)

What I’d check next (fast, high-signal)

A) Confirm whether the tool actually exists in the session’s tool registry
- In the same chat/session where it fails, run: /context detail
/context detail

Paste the part that lists Tools + Skills (it also shows skill file paths, which helps catch “edited the wrong copy” issues).

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