stable · S-049
Agent Plugins
Distribute portable agent components in a versioned manifest package.
Markdown · JSON · Canonical source
- Revision
- 1.0.0
- Maturity
- stable
- Authority
- Cross-vendor technical steering committee
- Structure
- Closed JSON manifest with optional skills, MCP configuration, and vendor namespaces
- Roles
- plugin-author, client, host
Agent Plugins combines a portable manifest core with optional skills and MCP configuration. Namespaced extensions allow hosts to preserve non-portable behavior without redefining the core format.
Open Agent Plugins, Claude plugins, Cursor plugins, Codex plugins, Kiro Powers, and VS Code agent plugins are related packaging families, not automatically interchangeable formats. The catalog keeps their install, trust, hook, and lifecycle semantics distinct.
Catalog mapping
Atomic capability rows
Absence here means the feature tree has not yet been published, not that the specification lacks the capability.
- Agent Plugins failure isolationReject invalid components narrowly without disabling valid components in the same package.
- Agent Plugins packaged MCPLoad MCP server configuration contained in an Agent Plugins package.
- Agent Plugins packaged skillsLoad portable Agent Skills contained in an Agent Plugins package.
- Agent Plugins portable manifestLoad the published portable plugin.json manifest and its core components.
- Plugin vendor extensionsPreserve namespaced host-specific behavior without representing it as portable core support.
Conformance boundary
Proposed tests
Definitions only. No fixture has been executed against a harness.
- T-PLG-001plugin.json Agent Plugins 1.0 validation · required
- T-PLG-002mcp.json PLUGIN_ROOT resolution · optional