Introducing Agent Plugins

TL;DR: AWS, Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel jointly launched Agent Plugins — an open, vendor-neutral packaging format for agent extensions that lets Skills and MCP servers be reused across products. ## Background: From Skills and MCP to Plugins Skills and MCP servers are making agents more powerful, and Plugins give developers a way to package these capabilities for sharing and reuse. But the problem is: today, every agent product expects a different manifest, folder structure, and setup process. This fragmentation increases the burden on plugin developers and limits the potential for cross-platform reuse. ## What Agent Plugins Is Agent Plugins is an open, vendor-neutral way to package agent extensions. It was created collaboratively by contributors from AWS, Cursor, GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel. Its goals are simple: - Provide a unified format for people building plugins - Provide a predictable discovery mechanism for agent tools In its simplest form, an Agent Plugin is a folder with a manifest file named `plugin.json` at its root. ## This First Release Focuses on Two Capabilities This initial release focuses on two things developers are already using: 1. **Agent Skills**: for reusable instructions and workflows. 2. **MCP servers**: to connect agents to tools and data. Developers can place these resources in standard locations so that the same package is more likely to be supported across different products. ## Value and Benefits For plugin authors, the benefits are: - Less platform-specific glue code - A unified versioned format to build against For agent products: - Support skills, MCP, or both - Extend the format without changing its portable core ## Standardization Scope: Packaging and Discovery, Not Runtime Note that the Agent Plugins specification standardizes **packaging and discovery**, not marketplaces, permissions, or runtimes. In other words, it only addresses "how to organize, describe, and find plugins," leaving marketplace mechanisms, permission models, and execution environments to each product. ## Open Ecosystem and Next Steps Agent Plugins is open and can be built with right away. The recommended path is: 1. Package your capabilities 2. Add support in your product 3. Check it out for yourself Start at agentplugins.org (https://agentplugins.org). ## Source Introducing Agent Plugins - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaeWJK_vv-Y)