– Agent Sessions Day on Feb 19th

Agent plugins in VS Code (Preview)

Agent plugins are prepackaged bundles of chat customizations that you can discover and install from plugin marketplaces in Visual Studio Code. A single plugin can provide any combination of slash commands, agent skills, custom agents, hooks, and MCP servers.

Plugins work alongside your locally defined customizations. When you install a plugin, its commands, skills, agents, hooks, and MCP servers appear in chat.

Note

Agent plugins are currently in preview. Enable or disable support for agent plugins with the

chat.plugins.enabled
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setting.

What plugins provide

An agent plugin can bundle one or more of the following customization types:

  • Slash commands: additional commands you can invoke with / in chat
  • Skills: agent skills with instructions, scripts, and resources that load on-demand
  • Agents: custom agents with specialized personas and tool configurations
  • Hooks: hooks that execute shell commands at agent lifecycle points
  • MCP servers: MCP servers for external tool integrations

Once installed, plugin-provided customizations appear alongside your locally defined ones. For example, skills from a plugin show up in the Configure Skills menu, and MCP servers from a plugin appear in the MCP server list.

Discover and install plugins

VS Code provides a dedicated view in the Extensions sidebar to browse and manage agent plugins.

Browse available plugins

  1. Open the Extensions view (⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X)) and enter @agentPlugins in the search field.

    Alternatively, select the More Actions (three dots) icon in the Extensions sidebar and choose Views > Agent Plugins.

  2. Browse the list of available plugins from your configured marketplaces.

    Screenshot of browsing agent plugins in the Extensions sidebar.

  3. Select Install to install a plugin in your user profile.

View installed plugins

The Agent Plugins - Installed view in the Extensions sidebar shows the plugins you have installed. From this view, you can enable, disable, or uninstall plugins.

Screenshot of the Agent Plugins - Installed view in the Extensions sidebar.

You can also manage installed plugins from the Chat view by selecting the gear icon > Plugins.

Configure plugin marketplaces

By default, VS Code discovers plugins from the copilot-plugins and awesome-copilot. You can add additional marketplaces with the

chat.plugins.marketplaces
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setting.

Marketplaces are Git repositories that contain plugin definitions. You can reference them in several formats:

  • Shorthand: owner/repo for public GitHub repositories. For example, anthropics/claude-code.
  • HTTPS git remote: a full URL ending in .git. For example, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code.git.
  • SCP-style git remote: SSH-style references. For example, git@github.com:anthropics/claude-code.git.
  • file URI: a file:/// path to a marketplace repository already cloned on disk.

Private repositories are also supported. If a public lookup fails, VS Code falls back to cloning the repository directly.

// settings.json
"chat.plugins.marketplaces": [
    "anthropics/claude-code"
]

Use local plugins

If you manually clone or download a plugin, you can register it with the

chat.plugins.paths
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  • Open in VS Code Insiders
setting. This setting maps local plugin directory paths to an enabled or disabled state.

// settings.json
"chat.plugins.paths": {
    "/path/to/my-plugin": true,
    "/path/to/another-plugin": false
}

Set the value to true to enable the plugin, or false to keep it registered but disabled.

Related resources

3/4/2026