--- title: Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness | daily.dev description: A developer built 'demonkey', a Claude Code plugin that acts as a Socratic coding tutor for learning Ruby process internals (fork, signals, sockets). The post... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness | daily.dev og:description: A developer built 'demonkey', a Claude Code plugin that acts as a Socratic coding tutor for learning Ruby process internals (fork, signals, sockets). The post... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/pjv3PbYyV.png og:image:alt: Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness **[The Miners](https://daily.dev/sources/miners)** · 23 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A developer built 'demonkey', a Claude Code plugin that acts as a Socratic coding tutor for learning Ruby process internals (fork, signals, sockets). The post documents four iterations of the design, each exposing a new failure mode: prose rules without enforcement, hooks that can't block prose dictation, UI features that leak answers, and quiz structures that telegraph correct answers. The core architecture uses three layers — CLAUDE.md advice, SessionStart hook injection for orientation, and PreToolUse hook denial as hard enforcement — plus plain-file state (progress.json) scoped per project directory so sessions survive compaction and closed laptops. The post generalizes the pattern beyond education: any team workflow can be encoded as a plugin with skills, hooks, and disk state, then distributed via a private git repo acting as a marketplace with no registry service required. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How do I make a Claude Code hook deny a tool call and tell the model what to do instead? Return a JSON object with `permissionDecision: "deny"` and a `permissionDecisionReason` string, then exit 0. The reason text is the only thing the model sees after the block, so it functions as a redirect prompt — writing 'explain the docs, let the learner type it, then review specific lines' produces cooperative behavior, while writing only 'forbidden' produces retries. The hook script never needs to return a non-zero exit code. _Teams encoding workflow rules as Claude Code hooks track patterns like this on daily.dev._ ### How do I persist state across Claude Code sessions so the agent remembers where it left off after context compaction or a laptop restart? Store state in a plain file inside the project directory, not in ~/.claude. A SessionStart hook reads that file before the model wakes up and injects the current state via `additionalContext`. Because the file is scoped to the project folder (using `CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR`), separate project directories start fresh independently, the same way `.git` directories work. No database or context-window memory is needed. _Developers building multi-session Claude Code workflows share approaches like this on daily.dev._ ### How do I distribute a Claude Code plugin to my whole team without a registry service or asking everyone to configure things manually? Drop a `marketplace.json` file in any git repo listing your plugins by source path. Team members install with `/plugin marketplace add owner/repo` then `/plugin install pluginname@repo` — GitHub shorthand, any git URL, self-hosted GitLab, a local path, or a plain URL all work. For ephemeral use, `--plugin-dir ./myplugin` skips installation entirely and shadows any installed plugin of the same name. _Engineering teams standardizing on Claude Code workflows find distribution patterns like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Plugins made Claude Code feel less like a chat window and more like a command center](https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-made-claude-code-feel-less-like-a-chat-window-and-more-like-a-command-center-27pzq5wdf) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How We Use Claude Code at Serokell](https://daily.dev/posts/how-we-use-claude-code-at-serokell-xqpyzepya) · Serokell · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Claude Code Plugin Marketplace & Skills Guide \(2026\)](https://daily.dev/posts/claude-code-plugin-marketplace-skills-guide-2026--n1mlq6ku6) · Alex CloudStar · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Stop Tuning Prompts. Build a Harness.](https://daily.dev/posts/stop-tuning-prompts-build-a-harness--2oxytvlqz) · Pulumi · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#ruby](https://daily.dev/tags/ruby), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv"},"datePublished":"2026-08-10T14:46:20.843Z","dateModified":"2026-08-10T14:47:37.470Z","description":"A developer built 'demonkey', a Claude Code plugin that acts as a Socratic coding tutor for learning Ruby process internals (fork, signals, sockets). 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