Claude Code & Coding Agents

Getting more out of coding agents: Claude Code skills, plugins, hooks and subagents, Cursor rules, Codex workflows and the tools engineers add to them.

Coding agents stopped being autocomplete once they could run commands, read a repository and load instructions on demand. The real gains now come from their extension points; a well-written skill or plugin changes what Claude Code does across every session, while a poorly scoped one fills the context window with instructions the task never needed.

These articles review the skills and plugins worth installing, explain how skills load and why they fail, and follow how OpenAI, Anthropic and others are opening their coding agents to each other.

Start here: Agent skills research · Memory vs agent skills · Agent skills (glossary)