Agent Plugins 1.0.0: the packaging war ended before it started

Six clients. One manifest. Zero vendor lock.

Vercel published Agent Plugins 1.0.0 on August 6, an openly licensed spec that bundles Agent Skills and MCP servers behind a single portable manifest. The shape is deliberately boring: a plugin.json requiring only schemaVersion and name, a skills/ directory, an mcp.json, and reverse-DNS subdirectories (com.example.client/) for client-specific extensions that other clients ignore. Vercel started the proposal; AWS, Anysphere, GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI refined it. The Technical Steering Committee pulls Core Maintainers from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI and Vercel. ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro and VS Code all support it at launch, and the spec repo agentplugins/agent-plugins-spec ships a conformance checklist defining the minimum a client has to implement to discover and load a plugin.

Google joined the TSC the same day, represented by Kevin Hou from DeepMind, and shipped two products in the format immediately: Agents CLI, which packages Google's own skills for agent building, evaluation, deployment and observability, and Data Agent Kit, a plugin collection wiring BigQuery, Spanner and Cloud SQL into any compatible client. Both work across Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Claude Code and Cursor. Google describing its own agent skills as distributable "in a format that isn't ours alone" is the part that tells you where this went.

I maintain forked skill folders for three different clients right now. That work just became obsolete, which is good, and it also means the thing I was quietly using as a differentiator (knowing how to package for each one) is worth nothing. Fine. Packaging was never where the value was.

The uncomfortable half: the distribution surface got wider than the review process on the exact same day. Anthropic added skill and plugin security scanning for Enterprise plans on August 6: automatic malware inspection whenever a third-party skill or plugin is added or modified. First-party release note, no accompanying blog post explaining the method. That's a scanner shipping in beta against a distribution format that went cross-vendor the same morning. And Codex CLI 0.147.0 landed August 7 with portable plugin search across local, personal, workspace and remote catalogs, plus the ability to import Cursor-managed skills.

What to do this week: collapse your per-client skill forks into one plugin directory and put the client-specific bits in reverse-DNS subdirs. Then write down where each skill in your install came from, because nothing in this spec carries provenance and you're going to want that list when the first bad plugin ships.