Anthropic Plugin Development

Anyone who wants to show an employer that they can do forward deployed engineering work needs something concrete to point to. A résumé line saying you understand customer problems is easy to write and hard to verify. This article looks at one direct way to produce that evidence: building a plugin on Anthropic's platform. The source material presents this path as especially current, because Anthropic's Code with Claude conference in 2026 introduced enterprise plugin templates covering several industries, including HR, design, engineering, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management.

A plugin is attractive for this purpose because a well-built plugin is described as a microcosm of forward deployed engineering work. Even at small scale, it forces you to do the same kinds of thinking a deployed engineer does on a real customer engagement. As you read, keep one question in mind: what does a hiring reviewer need to see in order to judge the work without having to take your word for it?

The source describes making a well-built plugin as a sequence of decisions rather than a single act of writing. Follow the stages in order. First, you pick a vertical, meaning a specific industry or domain you understand. Second, you identify a job-to-be-done, which is one concrete task that people in that vertical need to get finished. Third, you package the prompts, tools, and configuration that let the plugin carry out that task. Fourth, you make the package self-contained enough that someone else can install it and try it in about five minutes. The end point is a portfolio entry that a reviewer can evaluate.

Notice that the order is part of the lesson. Treating the plugin as a chain of decisions, rather than as a pile of prompts, is what turns a demonstration into something a reviewer can judge. The diagram shows the sequence the source describes; it does not add stages the source does not name.

The three parts have distinct roles. The prompts carry the instructions that tell the underlying model what to do for the task. The tools are the capabilities the plugin can call on while doing that work. The configuration holds the settings that shape how the package behaves. Because all three travel together, the plugin can be handed to someone else as one unit rather than as a set of loose files that only you know how to assemble.

Building the package is only part of the work. The source states that a plugin produces three things: a trace, an eval set against the plugin's task, and wrapper logic that makes the plugin reliable. Each shipped plugin therefore carries evidence beyond its installable parts. The source names the trace and the eval set without defining every detail of either, so treat them here as outputs you must be able to show, not as a fully specified format.

The diagram follows the source's wording. The source ties the wrapper logic to reliability and ties the evaluation evidence to the ability to defend the plugin. The word defensible is a reading of the source's emphasis on evidence, not a separate technical term. The diagram links each output to the plugin as a whole, because the source does not say which individual component produces which output.