Creating a plugin

uze is Plugin First, Capability Aware (ADR-008): the package you author is the distribution unit, and each capability inside it is the compatibility unit. You write one canonical layout; uze delivers it through each harness's own native surface — see Standards, not another format for why the layout looks the way it does.

The canonical layout

Every part after plugin.json is optional — ship only what your plugin needs. uze's Store preserves every byte verbatim; nothing here is re-serialized into an internal schema.

plugin.json

The Agent Plugins 1.0.0 schema, minimal:

{
  "$schema": "https://agent-plugins.org/schemas/1.0.0/plugin.schema.json",
  "name": "flow",
  "description": "What this plugin does, in one sentence."
}

This is the repo's own official plugin, verbatim (plugins/uze/plugin.json) — a real, minimal example, not a hypothetical one.

Skills

A Skill is the canonical capability — skills/<name>/SKILL.md, Markdown with frontmatter:

---
name: review
description: Review the current changes
invoke:
  model: false
  user: true
---

Body the model reads when the skill runs.

The portable semantics are invoke: {model, user} — who may invoke it, not a separate capability kind:

No invoke: block means the default (model: true, user: true) — an existing SKILL.md with no frontmatter block behaves exactly as before. Every harness translates this policy into its own encoding (Claude's frontmatter, Codex's agents/openai.yaml, OpenCode's metadata.opencode) — see Capabilities for the per-harness route.

MCP servers

mcp.json at the package root, the standard mcpServers shape:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "search": { "command": "my-mcp-server", "args": ["--stdio"] }
  }
}

Delivered natively wherever the harness has a native mechanism (claude mcp add, codex mcp add, agy mcp add, OpenCode's global config), or folded into the native/generated plugin envelope when one exists.

Agents

A portable agent profile — Markdown, agents/<name>.md:

---
name: planner
description: Breaks a task into an ordered implementation plan.
---

Everything below the frontmatter is the agent's instructions.

Only name, description, and the body are claimed as the portable subset (ADR-031). Claude Code, OpenCode, and Antigravity receive their documented native Markdown-agent surface; Codex has no on-disk Markdown agent format, so uze generates its documented standalone TOML file instead — name/description/developer_instructions mapped straight from your frontmatter and body, never hand-edited afterward. Vendor-only fields (model, permissions, delegation) stay unclaimed: an integration either genuinely preserves a field or reports the route as adapted, never a silent best guess.

Hooks

One authored hooks.json plus plain scripts — a narrow command ABI, not a plugin runtime (ADR-033):

{
  "hooks": {
    "PreToolUse": [
      {
        "matcher": "shell|file.write",
        "effect": "deny",
        "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "${PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/check", "timeout": 10 }]
      }
    ]
  }
}

• Events: PreToolUse, PostToolUse, Stop — no others are canonical.
• Matcher: |-separated portable tool aliases (shell, file.read, file.write, file.edit, search.files, search.web, agent.spawn, agent.message), or an explicit native:<tool> escape hatch. Omitted, it matches every tool.
• Effect: observe (default), allow, ask, deny, or transform (PreToolUse only).
• Your handler reads one normalized JSON object on stdin and may write one bounded JSON decision ({"decision": "allow|ask|deny", "reason": "..."}) on stdout. Exit 3 is the canonical hard deny; any other failure is fail-open for observe/allow and fail-closed for deny/ask/transform.

Testing it locally

There's no bare uze add <path> — a plugin is always resolved through a marketplace, even a one-plugin local one. Point uze at the directory that holds your marketplace.json (see below), not at the plugin itself:

$ uze market add ./my-marketplace
$ uze my-plugin@my-marketplace          # add it to the current project (agents.lock)
$ uze plugin inspect my-plugin          # capabilities + per-harness delivery, before or after install

plugin inspect is read-only and safe to run repeatedly — it's the fastest way to see exactly what uze thinks your package contains and how each harness will receive it, before committing to an install.

Publishing through a marketplace

A marketplace is a marketplace.json registry manifest at the root of a Git repo or local directory, listing one or more plugins by relative source:

{
  "name": "my-marketplace",
  "owner": { "name": "you", "url": "https://github.com/you" },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "my-plugin",
      "source": "./plugins/my-plugin",
      "description": "One sentence.",
      "keywords": ["example"]
    }
  ]
}

This is the repo's own official marketplace manifest (marketplace.json at the repo root), shown verbatim — this repository is uze's own marketplace, plugins/uze included. Push it to a Git repo and anyone can consume it:

$ uze market add https://github.com/you/my-marketplace
$ uze my-plugin@my-marketplace

marketplace.json was briefly named agents.json (ADR-023) and reverted (ADR-032) — if you see that name in older material, it's the same manifest under its current, correct filename.