Plugins: skill bundles for your role

A custom skill solves your workflow. A plugin solves a job role's workflow — and packages everything needed to do it into a single install. Skills, tool connections, slash commands, and sub-agent configurations bundled together, distributable to an entire team with one action.

Anthropic released plugins in January 2026 and simultaneously open-sourced eleven canonical plugins at github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins. They cover the job roles most likely to benefit from Cowork: sales, legal, finance, marketing, HR, engineering, design, operations, data analysis, personal assistant, and plugin management itself.

Plugin anatomy

A plugin is a folder with a specific structure:

plugin-name/
├── .claude-plugin/plugin.json   ← manifest (name, description, version)
├── .mcp.json                    ← tool connections (MCP servers)
├── commands/                    ← slash commands (/sales:call-prep)
└── skills/                      ← domain skills (auto-triggered)

The manifest identifies the plugin and describes what it does. The .mcp.json wires up any external tool connections the plugin needs — CRM access for a sales plugin, legal research tools for a legal plugin. The commands/ folder contains slash commands that expose the plugin's workflows to anyone who installs it. The skills/ folder contains the domain-specific skills that auto-load during relevant tasks.

When someone installs a plugin, all four components arrive together. They don't need to configure MCP connections, write skill files, or look up what slash commands are available — it's all in the package.

Why plugins beat individual skills

Bundled context. A sales plugin doesn't just have a skill for writing emails — it has a skill for call prep, a skill for proposal writing, a skill for competitive objection handling, and MCP connections to the CRM. The whole workflow is there, not just one piece.

Shareable. Fork the plugin on GitHub, customise it for your company's processes and language, distribute it to the team. Everyone gets the same workflow, not their own idiosyncratic version. When you improve the plugin, everyone gets the improvement.

Discoverable. Slash commands expose what the plugin can do without users having to know what skills exist or how to phrase requests. /sales:call-prep is a direct action. A skill that fires on description matching requires users to know what description triggers it.

Org-distributable. Team and Enterprise administrators can push approved plugins to everyone in the organisation from a central admin panel. If your company standardises on a project management workflow, the PM plugin can be installed on every seat at once, with the same configuration.

The meta-plugin

Plugin Create is one of the eleven open-source plugins, and it's worth installing first. It walks you through creating your own plugins — asking the right questions about your workflow, scaffolding the folder structure, and producing a working plugin rather than a blank template. This is the fastest path from "we have a repeated workflow" to "our whole team does it consistently."

The sequence: install Plugin Create → describe the workflow you want to standardise → Plugin Create scaffolds the plugin → customise the generated files → distribute to the team.

Installation

To install a plugin in Claude Desktop:

1. Open Claude Desktop
2. Go to the Cowork tab
3. Click Customize
4. Choose your installation source: catalog (Anthropic's curated list), GitHub (a URL to any public plugin repo), or upload (a local plugin folder)

Plugins are markdown and JSON files. They're trivial to audit — open the folder in any text editor and read exactly what the plugin does before running it. They're trivial to modify — edit the SKILL.md files in the skills/ folder, add or remove slash commands, adjust the MCP connections. Version them in git.