Your first plugin

Three stages, and the first two need nothing from the platform team.

Stage one: personal

claude plugin init my-tool --with skills

Scaffolds into ~/.claude/skills/my-tool/. Any folder there containing .claude-plugin/plugin.json loads as my-tool@skills-dir on the next session, discovered in place rather than copied into a cache. Edits to SKILL.md take effect immediately; run /reload-plugins for anything else.

No marketplace, no install step, no review. Most ideas do not survive a week of use, and this stage costs nothing to abandon.

Stage two: your team

Move the folder into your repository at .claude/skills/. Everyone who clones it gets the plugin after accepting the workspace trust dialog.

Restrictions tighten here: project-scope MCP servers go through per-server approval and background monitors do not load at all. That is deliberate, because reach widened.

Stage three: published

gh repo create {{ORG}}/<name> --template {{ORG}}/plugin-template --private

Make CI green, reserve the slug in {{ORG}}/agent-marketplace/names/, and the next assembly run adds the catalog entry. You never open a pull request against the marketplace.

Before you publish

Fill in evals/cases.jsonl with requests that should and should not trigger your skill. A skill that fires constantly is worse than one that never fires, because the second is merely useless and the first actively degrades every unrelated session.