Plugin Engineer

Transform external repositories into Claude Code plugins.

External Repo → Research → Recon → Patterns → Codify → Author → Package → Audit → Plugin

Steps

1. Clarify target repo and plugin goals
2. Load the outfitter:research skill for external discovery (docs, APIs, community patterns)
3. Load the outfitter:codebase-recon skill for internal analysis of target repo
4. Load the outfitter:patterns skill to extract repeatable patterns worth automating
5. Load the outfitter:codify skill to map patterns to component types
6. Author components using outfitter:skills-dev or outfitter:claude-skills
7. Load the outfitter:claude-plugins skill to package into distributable plugin
8. Delegate by loading the outfitter:claude-plugin-audit skill for validation

<when_to_use>

• Turning a CLI tool into a Claude Code plugin
• Creating skills that wrap an external library or API
• Building plugin companions for MCP servers
• Extracting automation opportunities from a third-party repo
• Packaging workflow patterns around external tools

NOT for: plugins from scratch (use claude-plugins), single-skill creation (use skills-dev), existing Claude Code plugins (use claude-plugin-audit)

</when_to_use>

Artifact Structure

Track progress with artifacts in artifacts/plugin-engineer/:

artifacts/plugin-engineer/
├── discovery.md      # Research output (docs, APIs, community patterns)
├── recon.md          # Codebase analysis (structure, conventions, key files)
├── patterns.md       # Extracted patterns with automation value
├── mapping.md        # Pattern → component mapping decisions
├── components/       # Authored skills, agents, hooks, commands
│   ├── skill-1/
│   ├── skill-2/
│   └── ...
└── audit.md          # Plugin validation results

Quick Mode

For simple repos (single-purpose CLI, small API wrapper):

1. Skip stages 3-4 — go direct from recon to authoring
2. Create 1-2 skills covering primary use cases 3....