This is a cross-post — the original (and any updates) live at broke2builtai.com.
My Claude Code setup took months to accrete: a review command here, a formatting hook there, an MCP server for the database, a subagent for QA. Then I started a second project and discovered the setup didn't come with me — it was smeared across four config surfaces in the first repo, and "install my tooling" meant a twenty-minute archaeology dig through my own dotfiles. Plugins are Claude Code's answer to exactly that problem: one directory that bundles all of it, installable with one command.
What a plugin actually is
A plugin is a folder with a manifest. Inside it, the same primitives you can already wire up by hand, packaged to travel together:
Skills and commands — the prompt templates behind /name invocations, the same format as a custom slash command
