Creating plugins

Learn how to create your own skills, docs, and rules to share with your team

This section covers how to create custom Tessl packages (plugins) containing skills and rules tailored to your team's specific needs.

When to create plugins

Create custom plugins when you want to:

Codify team standards - Capture your coding conventions, best practices, and style guidelines as rules
Share procedural knowledge - Document workflows and processes as skills that team members can follow
Ensure consistency - Make sure everyone on your team follows the same practices automatically

What can you create?

Skills

Procedural workflows that guide agents through complex tasks step-by-step.

Example use cases:

API testing workflows
Database migration procedures
Deployment checklists
Code review processes

Learn more: Creating skills

Rules

Mandatory coding standards and conventions that agents always follow.

Example use cases:

Error handling patterns
Validation requirements
Response format conventions
Security best practices
Naming conventions

Hooks - Coming Soon

Hooks are deterministic commands that run automatically in response to events within an agent harness — for example, running a linter after a file is saved, or triggering a test suite before a commit.

Example use cases:

Run npm run lint automatically after the agent edits a TypeScript file
Validate an OpenAPI spec whenever a route handler changes
Post a summary to Slack when a PR is created

MCP - Coming Soon

MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools let your plugin expose custom tools that agents can call during a session — connecting them to internal APIs, databases, or services that wouldn't otherwise be accessible.

Example use cases:

Query an internal feature flag service so the agent knows which flags are active
Look up your internal component library to suggest the right component for a given UI pattern
Fetch live API schema from a staging environment to keep the agent's understanding current

Learn more: Rules are included in plugins - see Developing plugins locally

Development workflow

Develop locally - Create and test your plugin in your project
- See Developing plugins locally
Package as a plugin - Structure your skills, docs, and rules into a plugin format
- Skills: Creating skills
Distribute - Share your plugin with your team or the community
- See Distributing via registry