---
title: "Plugins Are How You Ship a Claude Code Harness"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness-pjv3pbyyv
source_url: https://blog.codeminer42.com/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness
type: article
source: "The Miners"
published: 2026-08-10T14:46:20.843Z
updated: 2026-08-10T14:47:37.470Z
tags: ["ai-agents", "ruby", "ai-coding", "claude-code"]
reading_time: 23
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: 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: <https://blog.codeminer42.com/plugins-are-how-you-ship-a-claude-code-harness>

## 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
- [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

---

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)