Hooks govern control flow, skills inject knowledge, and plugins package both. looplane now has opt-in deny-only project hooks, a bounded SKILL.md loader, exact enabled_skills selection, plugin manifests/install/list, and external-runtime projection. Input rewriting, full lifecycle coverage, remote registries, and a mature marketplace remain open.
Looplane treats skills as bounded repository-local guidance, hooks as opt-in host commands that can only deny, and local plugin manifests as packages for skills and hooks; their authority is deliberately different.
Attach enough MCP servers and the tool schemas alone eat your context — upstream's extreme example is Cloudflare's ~3,300 tools, whose names alone run about 32K tokens. Hermes answers with Tool Search: MCP and non-core plugin tools collapse into three bridge tools and schemas load on demand, while core tools never defer. Separately, plugins are disabled by default and only run when named in `plugins.enabled`.
The official framing is to treat plugin installs like running code — ClawHub and the bundled catalog are trusted sources, while arbitrary npm, git, and local paths require --force in noninteractive installs. And verification means inspect --runtime, because a bare inspect is only a cold manifest check.
When the tool catalog no longer fits in the prompt, OpenClaw offers two answers: Code Mode shows the model only exec and wait and has it write small programs against a hidden catalog, while Tool Search keeps structured search/describe/call controls. Neither bypasses tool policy.
Plugins add distribution, not new capabilities: they collect skills, agents, hooks, and MCP settings scattered across .claude/ into one manifest-backed directory that marketplaces can install, update, and version-pin. This post covers plugin structure, the minimal build flow, publishing a marketplace, and dependency version constraints.