Copying Files Is Not Installing

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0500

A marketplace install copies your plugin’s files into place. It does not run npm install in them. Those are two different operations, and the gap between them is where “works on my machine” lives.

We hit that gap shipping Bob’s Big Brain, a Claude Code and Cowork plugin that runs a local stdio MCP server to give a team a governed knowledge brain. In the author’s checkout it worked. For every teammate installing from the marketplace, one of its two modes died on start. The teammates did nothing wrong. The install path had an assumption baked into it, and the assumption only held on the machine where the code was written.

Packaging on Start AI Tools - Presented by Intent Solutions

Copying Files Is Not Installing