Agents

Put skills in a plugin marketplace

If you're looking for how to share agent capabilities across your teams, choose a plugin marketplace. It gives you a distribution route capable of carrying all components a workflow needs.

Gino Wuytjens5 Nov 20263 min read

We were exploring an organization-wide skill registry when a shift in distribution caught my attention: the repositories I was finding increasingly offered skills as plugins in a marketplace. It seemed the industry was shifting its distribution toward plugin marketplaces. We ended up rolling out an organization-wide plugin marketplace.

But first, what should you even be teaching your agents?

Give the agent what it doesn't know

A skill packages instructions and supporting resources for a specific kind of work. Fill it with knowledge the agent cannot infer. An explanation of continuous delivery adds little. Your release process, including the exceptions that have caused trouble before, gives it something useful.

Workflows are a good starting point. So are project conventions and specialist judgment: how your team assesses a design, which exceptions matter in your pricing model, or why a particular migration approach fails in your environment. Deep expertise is useful when it supplies methods or decisions the agent would otherwise miss. It doesn't have to be proprietary to qualify.

The Agent Skills authoring guidance recommends adding what the agent lacks and omitting what it knows. Run a representative task without the skill. Where do you have to correct the agent? Those corrections are a useful starting point for the instructions, examples or scripts worth sharing.

Once a skill captures that knowledge, other teams should be able to find and reuse it. A skill registry gives them a shared catalog, with the skill files kept in repositories and available to install in their agent clients.

Four distinct skills in a registry. Team A chooses the second and fourth skills; Team B chooses the fourth skill too. Aligned horizontal and vertical connections link selections to matching copies. — Team A chooses two skills. Team B chooses one of those same skills. Matching patterns identify their choices in the shared registry.

Package the components a workflow needs

Plugins build on this idea. They let you bundle skills, MCP configuration, hooks and agent definitions. Cursor's plugin documentation includes all of these component types. A release plugin might combine its checks and approval instructions with deployment-tool configuration, a review agent and hooks for routine validation.

These pieces can be maintained and versioned together. A plugin containing only a skill is a valid starting point; include the other components when they serve the workflow.

An example plugin with two skills, MCP configuration, hooks and agent definitions. — The example plugin combines two skills with MCP configuration, hooks and agent definitions. A plugin can contain whichever components its workflow needs.

A plugin marketplace is a catalog of plugins. Teams install the packages they need through their agent clients and can share their own plugins with other teams.

Four distinct plugins in a marketplace. Team A chooses the first and third plugins; Team B chooses the third plugin too. Aligned horizontal and vertical connections link selections to matching copies. — Team A chooses two plugins. Team B chooses one of those same plugins. Both teams use their own copy of the shared package.

This has a cross-platform basis. The Agent Plugins specification defines a shared package format for skills and MCP configuration. Its compatible-client directory lists 11 entries, including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT/Codex and Kiro. Hooks and agent definitions use client-specific formats. Choose the components your clients support and keep the skill sources reusable.

Let teams build what they use

An organization plugin marketplace is a catalog of plugins shared within the organization. You can keep it in a private Git repository alongside the plugins, or reference plugins maintained in their own repositories. GitHub's reference documents the catalog format and the supported plugin locations.

Give each plugin a clear owner and version its releases. Keep proprietary material private and limit access where needed. Start with the installation mechanisms your agent clients already support; build a portal or custom installer only if those mechanisms fall short.

Have your teams encode the workflows they apply in their day-to-day work. They know how the work should be done, where the exceptions are and which decisions require judgment. Let them maintain the plugins for those workflows and share them through the marketplace.