Extending AI Tools with Plugins
Your AI coding assistant doesn't know your team's naming conventions, your deploy process, or that one module nobody should touch without running the integration tests. Here's how to teach it.
In our previous posts, we explored why context engineering is the most important skill for developers working with AI tools, and how Code Mode delivers structural code intelligence efficiently at the protocol level. But there's another side to context engineering that we haven't covered yet: the context you bring.
MCP servers give your AI agent better tools. But tools are only half the equation. The other half is knowledge: your team's conventions, your project's architecture, your workflows, your guardrails. The AI tools you use every day have a growing set of extension points designed to inject exactly this kind of knowledge: instructions, skills, rules, commands, and hooks.
In this post, we'll break down each of these primitives, show practical examples of each, and explain how plugins bundle them into shareable packages that give every engineer on your team the same supercharged AI experience.