One File Path Eliminated 84% of Tool Calls
OpenClaw's daily-ai-news cron job kept timing out. The root cause wasn't a weak model, bloated prompt, or upstream API failure — it was a missing absolute path in the SKILL.md, causing the Agent to spend 15 exec calls searching for a tool's location every run. Message count ballooned from 54 to 165, tool results from 204KB to 1.1MB. This is the full debugging story.