Question on plugin marketplace roadmap: when will marketplace-installed plugins load executable entries?

[uos1231234]

Hi Step Code team,

We've been building Step Code plugins and testing against v0.1.1. We ran into what looks like a deliberate design boundary rather than a bug, and we'd like to confirm our reading and ask about the roadmap. Line references are against a 2026-09-24 snapshot of main.

What we verified (source + local TUI):

1. step/plugins.ts L4-8 header says the built-in marketplace has a "deliberately smaller contract" and "this module owns discovery and provisioning only".
2. L645-646: a manifest with entry yields "Executable plugin entries are recorded but not loaded by the Step marketplace facade." So a marketplace-installed plugin can never load executable code today.
3. core/resource-loader.ts sources commands only from extension.commands (L752); its skill discovery roots (~/.stepcode/agent/skills, <cwd>/.stepcode/skills, ~/.agents/skills, settings skills) do not include ~/.stepcode/plugins/.... Verified locally: /plugin marketplace add + /plugin install succeeds and files land in ~/.stepcode/plugins/<name>/, but the plugin's commands never appear in the palette — /reload and a full process restart don't change it.
4. step/mcp.ts L231-232 skips string mcpServers declarations; only inline objects are started.

Net effect: for marketplace-installed plugins, the only thing that runs is an inline mcpServers process. entry is recorded-but-not-loaded; commands/skills/agents are parsed and validated but never registered.

Questions:

1. Any timeline for letting marketplace-installed plugins load an executable entry (or bridging the marketplace and extensions channels)? This is the single blocker for "install from a marketplace and it just works" for extension-shaped plugins.
2. Any plan to wire manifest skills/commands/agents into the resource loader, so declarative marketplace plugins become slash commands / skills?
3. We noticed agent-core/src/harness/agent-harness.ts has this.hooks = new UnavailableRegistry("hooks.on", ...), and config/src/migrations.ts states "Hooks have been renamed to extensions." Is a lifecycle-event mechanism (equivalent to the extensions' pi.on("turn_end" / "session_before_compact" / "tool_result")) on the roadmap for marketplace plugins? Our use case must act right before compaction; extensions can do that today, marketplace-delivered ones cannot.
4. Minor: marketplace entries with an object source are skipped ("this runtime cannot fetch"), and string sources must resolve inside the checkout. Any plan to support remote owner/repo entries, so plugin authors can keep code in their own repo and just be indexed?

Context: we published a context-archive extension (MIT) at https://github.com/uos1231234/step-context-archive, with a declarative copy pending in a community marketplace PR. Happy to help test any of the above. If 1-3 are out of scope for now, we'll document the current contract in our README so users aren't surprised.

Thanks for the great work on Step Code.

[xuxujo97-coder]

This comment was generated by AI during triage.

Thanks — the line references made verification direct.

Verification (against current main)

• Your reading is correct: packages/coding-agent/src/step/plugins.ts:631 emits "Executable plugin entries are recorded but not loaded by the Step marketplace facade." (line drifted slightly from your 09-24 snapshot), and the module header scopes itself to discovery and provisioning — marketplace-installed plugins indeed cannot load executable code today.

When marketplace entries will gain an executable load path is a roadmap call; routed to the maintainers.