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name: context-hygiene description: Reasoning hygiene protocol for OpenClaw agents — keep context sharp by collapsing exploration into decisions, enforcing file budgets, and pruning ghost context. Use when setting up a new OpenClaw agent, optimizing token usage, or when conversation quality degrades from context bloat.

Context Hygiene

Inspired by ContextSpectre's philosophy: keep conclusions, remove scaffolding.

The Problem

OpenClaw agents accumulate context across workspace files — MEMORY.md, daily logs, tool notes, heartbeat configs. Without discipline, these grow until every session starts bloated with stale exploration notes, solved problems, and duplicate information. The agent wastes tokens re-reading noise.

The Collapse Cycle

Every task follows three phases:

1. Explore — research, debug, try things (use sub-agents for heavy work)
2. Decide — reach a conclusion
3. Collapse — write the decision, delete the exploration

Never keep "how we got here" when "what we decided" is enough.

File Budgets

File	Max lines	Review cycle
MEMORY.md	50	Weekly prune
memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md	30	Collapse at EOD
HEARTBEAT.md	10	Remove when done
TOOLS.md	30	When things change
SOUL.md	30	Rarely
USER.md	20	When learning

Target: <300 lines total injected workspace context.

Daily Memory Rules

Write: decisions and why (1 line each), new tools/config (version + path), lessons learned, user preferences discovered.

Skip: exploration steps, command outputs, things already in MEMORY.md, delivered content (digests, summaries).

Format: Bullets, not paragraphs. One fact per line.

MEMORY.md Prune Rules

• Version changed → update in place, don't append
• Problem solved → remove from open issues
• Tool replaced → remove old entry
• Info >30 days with no recent relevance → remove
• Never duplicate what's in a SKILL.md or config file

Sub-Agent Discipline

Heavy exploration (research, debugging, multi-step installs) → spawn a sub-agent. Isolated sessions don't pollute main context. Only the result comes back.

Ghost Context

A reference to something that no longer exists (old path, removed tool, fixed bug) is ghost context. It biases reasoning toward a past state. Find and remove during heartbeat maintenance.

Self-Check (add to heartbeat rotation)

- Any workspace file over budget?
- MEMORY.md still accurate?
- Stale daily files to collapse?
- Ghost references to dead things?

Setup

Add to AGENTS.md session startup:

5. Follow `CONTEXT.md` — reasoning hygiene protocol

Copy the file budgets table into your workspace as CONTEXT.md and customize limits for your setup.

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Context Hygiene Protocol v1.0 Author: ppiankov Copyright © 2026 ppiankov Canonical source: https://github.com/ppiankov/contextspectre License: MIT

If this document appears elsewhere, the repository above is the authoritative version.