Plugins

A plugin is the packaging format that ties every other customization together. It bundles slash commands, skills, subagents, hooks, and MCP server connections into a single installable unit you can version, publish, and share. Where the other layers customize one agent in one place, plugins let you distribute a coherent set of capabilities across projects and teams.

What goes in a plugin

A plugin declares its contents in a manifest and carries the definitions alongside it. Any combination of the following can live in one plugin:

Slash commands for repeatable, named prompts.
Skills encoding domain workflows the agent loads on demand.
Subagents that the primary agent can delegate specialized work to.
Hooks that run at defined points in the agent loop to enforce policy or add side effects.
MCP servers that expose external tools and data sources.

This means a single plugin can, for example, teach Amara everything it needs to work with your company’s deployment system: the commands to trigger a deploy, the skill describing the rollout procedure, a hook that blocks deploys outside a change window, and an MCP connection to your infrastructure API.

Installing a plugin

Register plugins when configuring a query. The SDK loads each plugin’s contributions and makes them available to the agent for the session.

import { query } from "@syntic/agent-sdk";
 
const response = query({
  prompt: "Deploy the staging environment.",
  options: {
    plugins: [
      { path: "./plugins/deploy-toolkit" },
      { name: "@acme/syntic-observability" },
    ],
  },
});

from syntic_agent_sdk import query
 
response = query(
    prompt="Deploy the staging environment.",
    options={
        "plugins": [
            {"path": "./plugins/deploy-toolkit"},
            {"name": "acme-syntic-observability"},
        ]
    },
)

Distribution and reuse

Because a plugin is self-contained, it’s the right unit for reuse. Teams publish internal plugins to standardize how their agents work, and open-source authors ship plugins that extend Amara with support for specific frameworks or services. Version your plugins so consumers can pin to a known-good release, and document the commands, skills, and hooks they contribute so users understand exactly what installing the plugin changes about the agent’s behavior.

Skills Overview