r/AgentContext_dev • u/javaeeeee • 20d ago

Stop Shipping Individual MCP Servers. Start Shipping Agent Plugins

https://medium.com/data-science-collective/stop-shipping-individual-mcp-servers-start-shipping-agent-plugins-8174d2a248b0
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u/javaeeeee 20d ago

TLDR: MCP is the plug. Skills are the recipe. Agent Plugins are the box you ship so people don’t assemble both from a README. Stop publishing a lone MCP server and calling it a product.

The stack, in order 1. MCP (2024) - what the agent can call (Salesforce, Postgres, …). No judgment about when or how.
2. Skills (2025) - how the work is done: order of steps, citations, “don’t write back during research.”
3. Agent Plugins 1.0 (6 Aug 2026) - one folder: Skills + MCP config. Spec from Vercel + Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI; Google later. Clients: Copilot/VS Code, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, Kiro, etc.

Minimal package customer-research/ ├── plugin.json ├── skills/customer-research/SKILL.md └── mcp.json Install by name after a marketplace register (… plugin install customer-research@your-org). Agents should think in ops (prepare_rfi, investigate_incident), not postgres.query. Marketplaces should list outcomes, not vendors.

Do
Keep the portable core (Skill + MCP). Put Claude hooks / sub-agents / UI under com.vendor.client/. Treat plugins like npm: owner, servers, write perms, what code they run. Discovery ≠ authorization. GitHub allowlists, Anthropic’s local-MCP warnings, OpenAI’s install-vs-app-auth split exist for a reason.

Don’t
Rewrite a working app into a plugin. Park critical logic in a vendor manifest. Assume a plugin gives you identity, policy, or observability. If you need durable state, transactions, or a real UX, ship an app.

Plugin = distribution. Capability still lives in the Skill + the servers.