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Parked: plugin system (any-language executables + topic-based marketplace) #168

Description

@arzafran

Documenting a direction we looked at and are deliberately not taking right now.

The idea

  • Plugins are plain directories: a TOML manifest plus executable commands in any language, no SDK; the programa CLI is the plugin API, with the socket path injected via env
  • Plugins can register actions, open managed panes, react to workspace events, handle link clicks
  • Discovery is decentralized: tag a public GitHub repo with a topic (e.g. programa-plugin) and it appears in the marketplace index, no approval process

Why parked

A plugin surface this open is a large option surface, and the current product direction is the opposite: narrow options, defaults are the product. Until first-class integrations stop covering what users ask for, plugins dilute more than they add.

What keeps the door open

The OpenCode integration already ships as a local plugin (#139 / #156), so the seed exists. If we ever un-park this, that integration becomes the reference plugin and the manifest format gets extracted from it, not designed fresh.

Revisit trigger: two or more user requests that would each need a bespoke integration we don't want to own in-tree.

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