Create Cowork Plugin

anthropics/knowledge-work-pluginsOfficial

Walks you through building a Cowork plugin from scratch using a five phase workflow: discovery, component planning, design, implementation, and packaging. You end up with a ready to install .plugin file in your outputs directory. The skill knows the full plugin architecture (skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers) and asks clarifying questions to figure out what you actually need instead of scaffolding everything. It keeps the conversation nontechnical by default and favors the newer skills format over legacy commands. Useful when you want to extend Cowork but don't want to deal with manifest schemas and directory structures yourself.

skills.sh installs: 2.9K
GitHub stars: 35.3K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill create-cowork-plugin --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Create Cowork Plugin

Build a new plugin from scratch through guided conversation. Walk the user through discovery, planning, design, implementation, and packaging — delivering a ready-to-install .plugin file at the end.

Overview

A plugin is a self-contained directory that extends Claude's capabilities with skills, agents, hooks, and MCP server integrations. This skill encodes the full plugin architecture and a five-phase workflow for creating one conversationally.

The process:

Discovery — understand what the user wants to build
Component Planning — determine which component types are needed
Design & Clarifying Questions — specify each component in detail
Implementation — create all plugin files
Review & Package — deliver the .plugin file

Nontechnical output: Keep all user-facing conversation in plain language. Do not expose implementation details like file paths, directory structures, or schema fields unless the user asks. Frame everything in terms of what the plugin will do.