plugin-best-practices

This skill serves as the primary architectural validator for Claude Code plugin developers. It provides automated oversight to ensure plugins adhere to established best practices, structural requirements, and interface patterns. Designed for developers building specialized agents, skills, and MCP servers within the Claude Code ecosystem, this utility enforces consistency across the plugin lifecycle, from manifest creation to final deployment readiness. It is essential for maintaining code quality, ensuring token budget compliance through progressive disclosure, and verifying that tool invocations meet security and functional guidelines.

• Automated structural validation for file layouts, directory naming, and kebab-case compliance.

• Comprehensive manifest verification against schema requirements and required metadata fields.

• Rigorous frontmatter auditing for skill and agent components, ensuring third-person voice and accurate trigger phrases.

• Tool invocation analysis to detect and resolve anti-patterns between implicit and explicit tool calls.

• Progressive disclosure compliance checks, ensuring SKILL.md files remain under the 5k token budget for efficient context loading.

• RFC 2119 requirement level enforcement to ensure unambiguous technical documentation.

• Users should trigger this skill when initiating a new plugin project or preparing an existing one for public distribution.

• The workflow includes five sequential checks: Structure, Manifest, Frontmatter, Tool Invocations, and Token Budget.

• Expected output includes verbose logs detailing passing checks and specific actionable fixes for any detected violations.

• Integration is seamless; simply run the validator via the provided Python scripts or invoke the skill within the development environment.

• Constraints include strict adherence to the plugin component model, where instruction-type skills, knowledge-type skills, agents, and MCP servers each follow unique implementation requirements.

• Use the explicit naming convention (plugin-name:component-name) to ensure proper cross-plugin reference resolution.