Overview

Create a skill or a plugin - the packaged, versioned context you share with your team and your agents.

Takeaway A skill teaches an agent how to do something. A plugin is how you package one or more skills, together with rules, commands, MCP servers, and hooks, so you can version and share them. Start with a skill; reach for a plugin when you need to bundle more than one thing.

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md that teaches an agent how to do something. A plugin is the package that holds it: a .tessl-plugin/plugin.json manifest plus its content. Every skill you create with tessl skill new is already a minimal plugin, so "skill" and "single-skill plugin" are the same thing. You only think about plugins explicitly when you bundle more: several skills, a rule, a command, an MCP server, or a hook.

Whatever you create, you create it once. Tessl makes it work across every agent it supports, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and more, adapting it to each agent's own format on install. You never write a per-agent version.

The examples in this section use engteam as the workspace name. It is a stand-in: run tessl workspace list to see the workspaces you belong to, and use one of those in its place.

This section covers creating that context and getting it ready to share: writing a skill, bundling a plugin, adding an MCP server, testing locally, and publishing. It does not cover improving a skill's quality once written (see Improving your skills), enforcing a standard in CI (see Codifying and enforcing your skill standards), or rolling context out across many repositories (see Distribute).

All of this is also available through your agent. Install Tessl's plugin creator and it will do the steps below for you, from understanding the problem to building the plugin: tessl install tessl/plugin-creator