Agent Plugins - a new specification intended to standardize how skills and MCP servers are packaged across different agent harnesses.
The spec is a result of collaboration between Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, Vercel, and AWS, and looks like an attempt to provide an alternative to the growing plugin ecosystem around Claude Code.
According to the spec, a plugin should have the following structure:
my-plugin/
├── plugin.json
├── skills/
│ └── summarize/
│ ├── SKILL.md
│ ├── scripts/
│ └── references/
├── mcp.json
└── com.example.client/
└── hooks/
And that's basically where the specification ends.
There are no answers to questions like: How should users discover available plugins? How should plugins be distributed and installed? How to deliver a new version and roll it out to clients? All of that is left to each particular harness implementation.
In other words, Agent Plugins standardizes the package format, but not package management.
And this makes it difficult to operationalize across an organization. Moreover, Claude Code, for example, doesn't support it at all, and there is currently no obvious reason for Anthropic to adopt it.
Specifications are good. I actually really like them because they bring some order to the chaos of different integrations. But at the moment, Agent Plugins is far behind APM packages or the Claude Code plugins ecosystem.
Overall, it looks promising, but for now it's more something to watch than something you can build a sustainable process around. Let's see.
#ai #engineering
