Plugins: packaging and sharing extensions

We’ve now seen four ways to specialize Claude Code: Skills, subagents, and hooks on one side, MCP on the other. A plugin doesn’t add a fifth: it’s the installable package that groups any combination of those four — plus its own binaries and MCP/LSP servers — so you can share it with the team or install it on another machine in one go.

my-plugin/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json      # ONLY the manifest lives here
├── skills/               # everything else lives at the plugin ROOT
├── agents/
├── commands/
├── hooks/
│   └── hooks.json
├── bin/                  # executables added to the plugin's PATH
├── .mcp.json
├── .lsp.json
└── README.md

The rules almost everyone trips over the first time: nothing besides plugin.json goes inside .claude-plugin/ — everything else goes at the plugin root. The binaries in bin/ become available as system commands to the rest of the plugin’s pieces while it’s active. A plugin’s settings.json only accepts the agent field (on purpose: a plugin shouldn’t be able to override your global configuration).

A plugin makes sense once you already have a coherent set of skills/subagents/hooks that get used together and you want to install them with a single command on any project or machine on the team.

Three examples of real plugins, each with a different focus:

• superpowers — a set of process skills (brainstorming, systematic debugging, TDD, writing plans) that call for a disciplined flow before touching code, instead of jumping straight into implementation. Whether Claude follows it depends on the skill being loaded; it isn’t a guarantee.
• frontend-design — visual direction skills for avoiding the generic default “look”: typography, palette, layout, with intentional design judgment.
• code-review — the subagent and the logic behind /code-review: it reviews a diff or PR at different effort levels (from quick to multi-agent in the cloud) and can apply the fixes it finds.

Related documentation: the Plugins guide to get started, and the complete technical reference (plugin.json schema, marketplaces, distribution) once you have one running.