Confusing documentation on adding external plugins: are they allowed or not?

[toonvanvr]

Question

In CONTRIBUTING.md, I discovered that plugins from remote sources are not accepted. It's unclear whether my repository toonvanvr/prompt-engineering is a remote source or not, as it doesn't clearly define a remote source as being something hosted outside of the Github platform or something hosted outside of this Github repository.

I intended to add my repository to the list of Agent Plugins (VSCode preview feature), to make it available in the VSCode marketplace, but now I'm not sure if this is supported.

My main issue with understanding it, comes from this phrase:

While the plugin design allows us to support plugins from other GitHub repos, or other Git endpoints, we are not accepting contributions that simply add plugins from external sources.

It's not clear whether you're meaning "while it's supported technically, we don't allow it" vs. "we support sources from the Github platform, not third party platforms or sources".

References

CONTRIBUTING.md - What We Don't Accept

• Plugins from remote sources: While the plugin design allows us to support plugins from other GitHub repos, or other Git endpoints, we are not accepting contributions that simply add plugins from external sources. Plugins from remote sources represent a security risk as we are unable to verify their content for the policies we enforce on this repository. This policy does not apply to repositories that are managed by Microsoft or GitHub.

CONTRIBUTING.md - Adding External Plugins

To add an external plugin, append an entry to plugins/external.json following the Claude Code plugin marketplace spec. Each entry requires name, source, description, and version: