and finally last but definitely not least plugins and again i have some green and some red some pros
and some cons let's dig in so plugins are the sort of highest level idea and a plugin is a bundle of
stuff a bundle of features it can be a bundle of one or more mcp servers a bundle of skills
a bundle of commands things the way you do slash and then something um along with some other stuff
that claude kirk can do like hooks that i haven't explained yet but that we will do but all of these
things can be packaged up together into plugins and plugins is the most new idea of the ideas
plugins came in october 2025 so that's the sort of came at the end and i rather suspect that
plugins came along partly because people were getting a bit fed up with the weird discovery
jankiness that it's never quite clear where you go to uh to find things so plugins have kind of
sorted out this idea of having proper marketplaces having somewhere authoritative to go to understand
the source of these things and to package things up in in a better granularity but unlike mcp and
skills plugins only applies at least as of now to claude code it's like a claude code thing you don't
have plugins into chat gpt or anything else this is like anthropic claude code plugins and it's
designed specifically for claude code so it is the most simple idea of all is just just install a
plugin or don't it's something which uh allows the the people who implement the plugin to decide
how are we going to trade off what should be an mcp server what should be a skill we're not going
to worry the user about that we'll take we'll figure it out and take care of it and package
it into a good plugin and you do need to explicitly trigger commands you type them out and
that removes some of the sort of hand waviness of oh is this going to pick up or not uh so it makes
it makes just makes things a little bit more more bulletproof no no of course there are some
downsides there's always some downsides there's some downsides the first of them i don't know if
it's a downside but it's like a limitation that it's just a claude code thing uh it's the one
that's sort of the least configurable you just install the plugin and it's in and you know
there's always the risk that in doing so it's quite a broad brush stroke you're bringing in a
whole kind of package of stuff and maybe you'd rather mix and match or make these decisions
yourself but that's not what what plugins are about they're about like like bringing in this
this this new uh ability and so the simple bottom line is that whilst all of this stuff about mcp
and skills is kind of complicated and i've given you lots of of uh of complexity to navigate the
bottom line is most of the time just start with plugins if there's a plugin that's going to work
for you then you don't really need to worry that much about whether it's mcp or skills or whatever
else install the plugin you got the plugin installed you can then you'll see we can enable
it and disable it when we're using it when we're not and so that just gives you a way to keep things
simple stick with plugins unless you know better unless you want stock prices and you particularly
want to install the polygon massive mcp server because that's what you need to claw code to be
able to do if you need that then that makes total sense you do your research you install it but most
of the time for most everyday activities we will do plugins is the way to go and as it happens
you're already something of a pro with with plugins because you you we've used them already or at least
you've seen me use one already i don't think you've used it yet uh you know what i mean do you
remember me using a plugin give you a second to think about it yes well maybe no i don't know if
you got it or not but if you did congratulations yes the ralph loop thing remember when i kicked
off ralph loop and i think i said don't worry you you shouldn't run this but i'm going to blah blah
blah blah that was a plugin the ralph loop is a plugin that someone wrote that has a bunch of
stuff including a command and we ran the ralph loop command and that caused that craziness
yesterday with uh with with all sorts of stuff going on so that was our first example of using
plugins let's go now and have a look at more plugins so the marketplace for plugins is
something which can be directly accessed within claude which i will show you but also uh the the
main one that it links to is this claude plugins official is a is a repo in anthropx github and so
you can come in here and see it and you can see it explains the structure of the different plugins
that it's got and you can come in you see that there's a directory called plugins and one called
external plugins and this has a bunch of different plugins that we're about to see within claude code
in plugins which are written by anthropic and then external are ones written by other people
they've got people like context seven that's a familiar one uh they've got uh github uh the
gitlab as well um and playwright for browser automation and slack and stripe and superbase
so lots of plugins here in the official repository that are going to be uh very very useful now let's
go into claude code and see how you access these directly okay so i'm just first going to we're
looking here if i do if i first do slash skills you can see that we've got this this agent browser
skill right here uh so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to uh i'm going to come out of
claude code and i'm going to right click on skills directory here and i'm going to say delete
move to trash it's gone and now i'm going to start claude again and i'm going to do slash skills and
i just want to show you that there's now no skills found uninstalling a skill it's just a matter of
deleting the directory that's it okay so back back to to plugins i'm going to do slash plugin
and that is the way to launch the sort of in claude code experience of looking at these things
and you can see that there's there's um these three tabs discover installed and marketplaces
and if i flip between them you can see that we've only got one marketplace that i'm linked up to
and it's the claude plugins official marketplace and that's the marketplace that you will be linked
up to too and you can install additional marketplaces which you would only do you do
with care and only to a marketplace that you trust and a classic example might be that your own
company might have an internal marketplace or you could have one for your team it could be one you
just need to have access to it in in git you give like a github address and then you can have a
marketplace here which is how you could mix and match plugins between your team members or between
other people at your company so it's so clever so powerful uh and you can also add in other sort of
legitimate ones that you know about you trust but we're going to stick with a claude plugins
official marketplace which is in by default we've got no plugins installed right now i did i used to
have one that i that i uninstalled i used to have the ralph loot one that i removed before showing
you this and discover is where you can find new plugins that are part of the marketplaces that
you have active and these are ordered by the most popular with the most installs at the top and the
one that has the most installs of all is one called front-end design which creates distinctive
production grade front-end interfaces and a lot of people talk about this plugin it's meant to be
really amazing and we should definitely install that so let's press space to say we want that
plugin for sure next up is context 7 that's fun they've got a plugin as well it just it just
installs upstashes context 7 mcp server it's just the same thing uh it just it just gives us this
easier way i think i told you when i was when i was saying how how uh difficult it was to to
to discover mcp servers that you can also do it through plugins and that's exactly what we're
doing right now code review is something which is like an official anthropic written way to do a
code review for pull requests that's pretty cool i say we want that github this is one that that
installs the official github mcp server we're going to actually install that mcp server directly
ourselves uh and we're probably i think we're going to do that tomorrow um feature dev i don't
think we want that right now uh but this one code simplifier with 51000 installs this is anthropic
open sourcing their own internal agent that they have built which is able to simplify code
particularly code that might have been written by llms that might have what people call llm slop
a lot lots of uh overly complicated uh constructs the code simplifier is an example of an agent
which we haven't really we certainly haven't talked about having agents yet there's another
thing that comes in the mix with plugins but we'll install that too uh and i think
the next one the next one is hopefully familiar to you is the ralph loop that we used to have
uh that i'll leave uninstalled for now and then we will talk about lsps as well
later okay so that's a useful bunch of plugins