Lobster Workflows

### Quick judgment A well-scoped, specialized skill for teams migrating from OpenClaw cron jobs to Lobster workflows. It covers the full lifecycle: discovery, inspection, conversion, creation, and validation. For organizations standardizing on deterministic, approval-gated workflows, this is a strong fit. **Best suited for:** - Users already running OpenClaw cron jobs who want more control, safety, and observability via Lobster. - Teams that need deterministic, auditable automation with approval gates and resumability. - Environments where LLM steps should exist, but be contained within a structured, deterministic workflow. ### Key capabilities - **Discovery & assessment:** `lobster-jobs list` classifies cron jobs into fully migratable, partially migratable, or not migratable, giving a quick migration map. - **Deep inspection:** `lobster-jobs inspect <job-id>` surfaces schedule, payload type, and a migration recommendation, making it easier to prioritize work. - **Workflow validation:** `lobster-jobs validate <workflow-file>` enforces schema and structure (required fields, step structure, approval/condition syntax), suitable for pre-deploy checks. - **Automated conversion:** `lobster-jobs convert <job-id>` turns cron jobs into `.lobster` workflows, auto-validates, and supports options like custom output directories and `--force` overwrite. - **Scaffolded creation:** `lobster-jobs new <name> --template <template>` uses templates (simple-shell, with-approval, stateful) to bootstrap good-practice workflows. - **Incremental migration strategy:** Encourages a wrapper approach where cron remains the scheduler while Lobster runs the workflow, enabling low-risk rollout and easy rollback. ### Notable risks and limitations - **Classification & migration accuracy:** The readiness scores and migration recommendations are only as good as the underlying heuristics. Complex or unconventional cron jobs may be misclassified or produce workflows that still need manual correction. - **LLM-heavy jobs remain tricky:** Jobs that rely heavily on open-ended LLM reasoning are marked as not or only partially migratable. Users may still need to redesign such jobs to fit a deterministic workflow model. - **Operational safety is still user-dependent:** While approval gates and validation help, unsafe shell commands or misconfigured workflows can still be created. Flags like `--force` increase the risk of overwriting good configurations if misused. - **Ecosystem dependency:** Value is highest only if you are actually adopting Lobster. For users not committed to Lobster, the skill’s benefits are limited. ### Recommended scenarios Use this skill when: - You are **actively migrating** from OpenClaw cron jobs to Lobster workflows and want structured guidance and tooling. - You want **deterministic, auditable automation** with clear approval points instead of opaque cron + AI agents. - You need to **standardize workflow quality**, using validation and templates to ensure consistent structure and approval/condition syntax. - You’re implementing **governance or compliance controls** and need approval gates, stateful execution, and resumability over previously loose cron-based automations.