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Skills, Plugins & Marketplaces — Clearing the Confusion

There's a lot of confusion about how skills, plugins, and marketplaces work in Claude Code. This talk walks through the fundamentals with a practical example from SpecWeave and verifiedskill.com.

Watch the Talk​

Coming soon — video will be embedded here once published.

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What's Covered​

The 4 Concepts Everyone Confuses​

  • Skills — a SKILL.md file with instructions for Claude (like an app)
  • Plugins — a package bundling skills + agents + hooks (like an app bundle)
  • Marketplaces — a JSON catalog listing available plugins (like an app store)
  • Commands — the old name for skills (still works, same thing)

The Files That Make It Work​

  • SKILL.md — frontmatter config + markdown instructions
  • .claude-plugin/plugin.json — plugin identity (name, version, description)
  • .claude-plugin/marketplace.json — catalog of plugins with download sources

Practical Example: SpecWeave + vskill​

How SpecWeave delivers 126 skills across 22 plugins through a single marketplace — with skill chaining, dynamic context injection, and on-demand loading.

Key Takeaways​

  1. Skill = markdown file — it's just a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter and instructions
  2. Plugin = package — bundles skills, agents, hooks, and MCP servers with a plugin.json
  3. Marketplace = catalog — a marketplace.json listing plugins and where to fetch them
  4. Two invocation modes — you type /skill-name, or Claude auto-triggers based on the description
  5. Namespacing — plugin skills become /plugin:skill to prevent conflicts
  6. On-demand loading — plugins activate based on what you're working on, not all at once

Deep Dive: Read the Guide​

For the full written reference with code examples, diagrams, and SpecWeave internals:

Skills, Plugins & Marketplaces Explained — the complete guide

Official Claude Code Documentation​