# buildwithclaude: a plugin marketplace for installing Claude Code agents, commands and hooks

> davepoon/buildwithclaude is an MIT-licensed hub of 51 curated plugins plus a Next.js discovery site that indexes community marketplaces. It is useful if you want agents and slash commands without writing them, and awkward if you need a live index rather than a curated snapshot.

**davepoon/buildwithclaude** — A single hub to find Claude Skills, Agents, Commands, Hooks, Plugins, and Marketplace collections to extend Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Agent SDK and OpenClaw.

- Repository: https://github.com/davepoon/buildwithclaude
- Website: https://www.buildwithclaude.com
- Stars: 3,543 · Forks: 527
- Language: TypeScript
- License: MIT
- Published: 2026-08-08 · Updated: 2026-08-18 · Language: en
- Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/davepoon-buildwithclaude

## The gap buildwithclaude fills between raw Claude Code and a plugin library

Claude Code accepts agents, slash commands and hooks, but it does not ship a large library of them. You either write the markdown files yourself or copy them from a blog post. buildwithclaude packages that library: the README lists 117 agents, 175 commands, 28 hooks, 26 skills and 51 bundled plugins maintained in the repository, plus a web UI that indexes 20k+ community plugins, 4,500+ MCP servers and 1,100+ plugin marketplaces. The audience is Claude Code users who want a Python expert agent or a /commit command without authoring the prompt, and teams that want a shared starting set of workflows. The repository is TypeScript and MIT-licensed, and its last push was on 2025-10-24, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a continuously synced feed. That distinction matters more than the counts: the curated plugins live in this repo and change when someone opens a pull request, while the community index is fetched by scripts whose freshness depends on when those scripts were last run.

## How the marketplace, the plugins directory and the web UI fit together

There are two halves. The first is the plugin marketplace: plugins live under plugins/ as directories named by type and category, and each file is markdown with YAML frontmatter. An agent file carries name, description, category and a tools list such as Read, Write, Bash. A command file carries description, category and argument-hint. A hook file carries a hooks field naming events like PreToolUse and PostToolUse. Claude Code reads that frontmatter to decide when to invoke the agent and what the slash command accepts. The second half is the discovery site in web-ui/, a Next.js app with its own workspace, a server entry point at web-ui/server.js, and lib/ modules for indexing, search pagination and search hydration. The scripts directory holds the data pipeline: fetch-plugins.js pulls external plugin data, generate-registry.js builds the registry, and validate-all.js checks the plugin files. The Dockerfile shows the production shape: dependencies installed with npm ci, the Next.js app built with npm run build --workspace=web-ui, then a runner stage that copies the standalone server, the static assets and the plugins directory, because the app reads agents, commands and hooks from the filesystem at runtime rather than from a database. That last detail explains why the image is larger than a typical static site and why a missing plugins directory would break pages.

## Installing the buildwithclaude marketplace and running a first command

The README recommends the plugin marketplace route. Inside Claude Code, add the marketplace, then search it, then install a plugin. The search and install syntax uses the @buildwithclaude scope, and the README's own examples install agents-python-expert, commands-version-control-git and hooks-notifications individually, or the all-agents, all-commands and all-hooks bundles.

```bash
/plugin marketplace add davepoon/buildwithclaude
/plugin search @buildwithclaude
/plugin install commands-version-control-git@buildwithclaude
```

After the install, the slash commands from that plugin are available in the session. The README lists /commit, /create-pr, /docs, /tdd and /code_analysis as examples, and agents can be invoked by name in a prompt, for instance asking the python-pro to optimize a function or the devops-troubleshooter to debug a deployment. If you prefer to keep the files under your own control, the manual route clones the repository and copies the markdown into ~/.claude, then asks you to restart Claude Code.

```bash
git clone https://github.com/davepoon/buildwithclaude.git
cd buildwithclaude
find plugins/agents-*/agents -name "*.md" -exec cp {} ~/.claude/agents/ \;
find plugins/commands-*/commands -name "*.md" -exec cp {} ~/.claude/commands/ \;
```

The manual route copies every matching file at once, so it is worth listing the matches before running the copy if you only want a subset. To run the discovery site itself, the package scripts expose npm run start, which launches node web-ui/server.js, and the Dockerfile exposes port 3000 with PORT=3000 and HOSTNAME="0.0.0.0". The README does not document a rollback procedure for an installed plugin, so plan on removing the files or the marketplace entry by hand.

## Where buildwithclaude stops being the right tool

The repository is a curated snapshot, not a live mirror. The community figures in the README describe what the indexing scripts found when they last ran, and the last push was on 2025-10-24, so a marketplace that appeared afterwards will not be in the data until someone reruns the fetch and registry scripts and commits the result. If your goal is to track every new Claude Code plugin as it appears, this repository is the wrong layer; you want the upstream marketplace list itself. There is a second limitation in the manual install path: the find and cp commands flatten every agent and command into ~/.claude with no namespacing, so two plugins that define a file with the same name collide silently, and the README does not describe conflict handling. Third, the plugin files are prompts and shell-invoking hooks contributed by the community, and the repository's validation checks structure rather than intent. Running npm run validate confirms the frontmatter parses and the expected fields exist; it does not tell you whether a hook that runs on PostToolUse is safe in your environment. Read the hook files before installing hooks-notifications or anything that touches git.

## buildwithclaude compared with pointing Claude Code at an upstream marketplace

The direct alternative is to add a community marketplace URL to Claude Code and skip this repository entirely. That approach gets you the newest version of each plugin, because the upstream maintainer publishes it, and it avoids a middle layer that can go stale. The difference in approach is curation versus immediacy. buildwithclaude gives you a consistent set of categories, a validation script, and a web UI that searches across plugin types in one place, which is convenient when you do not yet know what exists. An upstream marketplace gives you one publisher's plugins with no cross-catalog search. A third option is writing your own agents and commands. That is more work but removes the trust question: the frontmatter format is small, and the README documents it, so an agent file is a name, a description, a category, a tools list and a role prompt. If you need three commands, authoring them yourself is faster than evaluating a bundle. buildwithclaude earns its place when you want breadth first and are willing to audit what you install.

## Maintenance, upgrade cost and what the MIT licence does not settle

The release history in the repository shows bwc-cli@1.2.4 and bwc-cli@1.2.3 on 2025-10-24 and bwc-cli@1.2.2 on 2025-08-20, so the CLI line has moved in small increments rather than large jumps. The last push to the repository was on 2025-10-24. Upgrading the marketplace is a matter of re-adding or reinstalling plugins, and the manual route means re-running the copy commands after a git pull. The real upgrade cost is not the code, it is the prompts: agents and commands are text you may have edited locally, and a fresh copy overwrites those edits. Keep your modifications in separate files or a fork. The web UI has its own dependency tree under web-ui/, so npm ci and the Next.js build are the heavier part of any contribution. On licensing, the repository is MIT, which permits commercial use and modification provided the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved. That covers the repository's own files. It does not automatically cover third-party plugins that the index points at, which carry their own terms, and it does not cover the prompts you copy into ~/.claude if their authors published them elsewhere under different terms. This is a description of the licence, not legal advice; check the LICENSE file and each upstream plugin if the distinction matters to your organisation.

## Conclusion

Adopt it if you want a curated set of Claude Code agents, commands and hooks installed in one step, and you are comfortable reading each plugin file before trusting it. Skip it if you need an index that tracks upstream marketplaces automatically, or if your team cannot run the npm validate and test scripts before merging plugin changes. Verify the frontmatter of any plugin you install, confirm the web-ui build works in your environment, and check the repository state yourself: the last push was on 2025-10-24.

## FAQ

### What is buildwithclaude?

It is a plugin marketplace and discovery platform for Claude Code, maintained by davepoon. The repository holds curated agents, commands, hooks, skills and plugins, and the web UI at buildwithclaude.com indexes community plugins, MCP servers and other marketplaces.

### What can you build with Claude?

This repository does not answer that in general. It documents what you can add to Claude Code: agents invoked by context or by name, slash commands such as /commit and /tdd, and hooks that run on events like PreToolUse and PostToolUse.

### How do I add the buildwithclaude marketplace to Claude Code?

Run /plugin marketplace add davepoon/buildwithclaude inside Claude Code, then /plugin search @buildwithclaude to browse and /plugin install <plugin-name>@buildwithclaude to install. The README also documents a manual route that clones the repository and copies markdown files into ~/.claude.

### How current is the buildwithclaude plugin index?

The repository's last push was on 2025-10-24, the same day bwc-cli@1.2.4 was released. The community index only updates when the fetch and registry scripts are run and the result is committed, so a marketplace added after that date will not appear until then.

### Can I self-host the buildwithclaude web UI?

The repository includes a Dockerfile that builds the Next.js app and runs node web-ui/server.js on port 3000, and package.json exposes npm run start for the same server. The runner stage copies the plugins directory because agents, commands and hooks are read from the filesystem at runtime.

## Sources

- [Official documentation](https://www.buildwithclaude.com)
- [Official README](https://github.com/davepoon/buildwithclaude#readme)
- [Project repository](https://github.com/davepoon/buildwithclaude)
- [Release notes](https://github.com/davepoon/buildwithclaude/releases)

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Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/davepoon-buildwithclaude