2. Plugin Creation & Action Steps
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Create a plugin — it doesn't matter what it does. Use the Plugin Maker skill and just ask Claude to make you one, or wrap one of your existing skills into a plugin (the wrapping is also just asking Claude). Then add that plugin to the marketplace you built in the Marketplaces course — if you haven't done that course yet, do it first so you understand how plugins and marketplaces work together. Install it and run it. Then make a small change (Claude will bump the version number, commit, and push), hit the three dots, and sync to confirm the update lands in your own test marketplace.
Training Guide
So how do you actually create a plugin? Like all the answers in life these days — you ask Claude to make you one.
Specifically, you use a skill we built for exactly this.
Asking Claude to Make You One
The tool for this is the Plugin Maker skill, which lives inside the LeanScale plugins plugin. Go to your Claude surface of choice — Cowork works — open Customize, and you'll see it at the organization level. If it's not installed yet, find Plugin Maker under your organization, hit the plus button to install it, and open it up.
It won't show you the details from the menu, but if you look at the Plugin Maker skill in the repo, you'll see a lot of detail in there — a TLDR, a 30-second model, "what a plugin actually is" — basically everything covered in the previous trainings, so Claude is fully up to date when it builds for you.
One honest caveat: to create that skill, all I did was run deep research on what a plugin is and then have Claude codify it into a skill. That does not make it the gospel way to build a plugin. Anthropic may ship their own plugins for making plugins, and other best practices will emerge. This is a developing field, so stay on top of it.
Building from scratch is one path. The other is taking something you already have.
Converting an Existing Skill Into a Plugin
You can turn an existing skill into a plugin by making sure there's a plugin.json inside the skill's folder. That manifest is what tells Claude this skill belongs to a plugin.
The move is simple: take the skill, wrap it into a bigger folder (the plugin folder), and make sure that folder has a plugin.json with the skill registered in it. Then there's the marketplace level on top, with its own marketplace.json — and the plugin gets registered there too.
There are levels to this game. Skill → plugin → marketplace, each one a folder with a manifest registering the layer below it.
Before you ship any of it, there's one thing you can never put inside.
Secrets and API Keys
You do not want to ship anything security-related inside a plugin. The best practice is to use a token instead.
A token is a little placeholder — something like $API_KEY — that tells Claude an API key is needed at this level, without containing the key itself. Claude then knows to go find the actual value somewhere else, like your environment container. The value stays safely in the environment; only the token lives inside the plugin. You don't need to memorize the exact format — just remember the principle: ship the requirement, never the secret.
The last thing — and it matters more than the build itself — is the habit.
Why You Should Dogfood This
Don't do this only for the sake of the training. Get used to changing your habits and editing your workflows so you stay aligned with where the technology is headed.
When you're using skills and plugins in your day-to-day — personal workflows and LeanScale workflows alike — you'll be on the cutting edge the moment a new feature unlocks, because it touches your work immediately. That's also what lets you answer a client or customer's questions with real confidence: you use this stuff yourself. The more you dogfood it, the more effortless R&D becomes, because you're already living in it.
Wrap-Up
Creating a plugin is mostly asking Claude — whether you're building fresh with Plugin Maker or wrapping a skill you already have. Register it up the chain (plugin.json, then marketplace.json), keep your secrets out of it, and then actually use it. Go make your own kitchen-sink plugin so everything — skills, agents, hooks, connectors — comes together in one place.
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