Skills & Plugins
Skills & Plugins
Plugins as Hire Decisions
Every plugin you install is like adding a new specialist to your team: useful when relevant, noisy when not.
You spend a Saturday browsing plugin marketplaces. A PR-review bundle has thousands of stars, so you install it. A research toolkit looks sharp: install. A design helper, a database assistant, a changelog generator. By the end you've added eight, and they all looked useful.
A week later Cowork feels different. Slower to start. It keeps offering commands you don't recognize for jobs you didn't ask about. A simple request comes back wrapped in machinery built for someone else's workflow. You don't review pull requests. You've never touched the database. But the helpers for both are riding along in every session.
The plugins weren't the problem. You hired eight specialists off their résumés, gave none of them a job description, and now they're all standing in the room talking.
The fix is to treat every install the way you'd treat a hire.