holocron/docs/adr/0015-apm-replaces-plugin-marketplace-authoring.md

Microsoft APM replaces the hand-authored plugin/marketplace model as this repo's authoring source of truth

Status: executed (2026-08-12, issue #90). All six plugins now carry apm.yml + .apm/ as their authoring source; .claude-plugin/marketplace.json and every plugin's plugin.json are apm pack-compiled output. Supersedes ADR-0001 ("Skills are distributed via plugins... each plugin contains its own skills/ directory") — in effect.

This repo replaces its hand-maintained Claude Code plugin/marketplace authoring model (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json + per-plugin plugin.json) with Microsoft APM (apm.yml + .apm/) as the authoring source of truth — an outright replacement of the authoring layer, not an additive overlay. This ADR records the decision from a grill-with-docs session on issue #88.

Context

Every plugin under plugins/<name>/ currently ships two hand-maintained manifests (.claude-plugin/plugin.json for Claude Code, root plugin.json for Copilot CLI) plus a hand-maintained root .claude-plugin/marketplace.json listing all plugins. Adding a provider means hand-authoring a third manifest shape; keeping the two existing ones in parity is itself a tracked concern (ADR-0006).

Research on Microsoft APM (plugins/kyberforge/docs/research/docs/microsoft-apm/) found that its documented "monorepo-hybrid" repo shape maps directly onto this repo's existing plugins/<name>/ layout: each plugin becomes its own apm.yml + .apm/{skills,agents,hooks,prompts,instructions}/ package, listed from a root apm.yml's marketplace: block. apm compile/apm pack generate per-target output — including a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json — from that vendor-neutral .apm/ tree, so provider manifests become compiled artifacts instead of hand-authored files, and new providers (Copilot, Gemini, Codex — all supported by apm runtime setup) no longer require a new hand-maintained manifest format.

Decision

• The plugins/<name>/ monorepo-hybrid directory layout survives. .claude-plugin/marketplace.json and per-provider plugin.json files become compiled output via apm compile/apm pack, generated from apm.yml + .apm/ per plugin, extensible to other apm runtime-supported providers without hand-maintaining a separate manifest per provider.
• This supersedes ADR-0001 ("Skills are distributed via plugins... each plugin contains its own skills/ directory"). Executed in issue #90: skills and agents physically moved to plugins/<name>/.apm/skills/ and plugins/<name>/.apm/agents/*.agent.md.
• New operational tooling — apm-install (skill), apm-workflow (skill), apm-orchestrate (agent) — lands in kyberforge, tracked in issue #88 (https://git.dev.rkdr.net/Defame1297/holocron/issues/88).
• Adapting skill-author/agent-author's routing to author .apm/-native content (retargeting to .apm/skills/, .apm/agents/ paths — the content these two skills author is still meaningful post-conversion) is deferred to issue #89 (https://git.dev.rkdr.net/Defame1297/holocron/issues/89). forge is out of scope for #89 — it stays untouched by this whole conversion effort and keeps routing to whatever the live author skills are at the time.
• plugin-author/marketplace-author are not adapted — they are superseded and deleted. Unlike skill-author/agent-author, nothing in these two skills carries forward as authoring routing: apm compile/apm pack will generate .claude-plugin/marketplace.json and per-provider plugin.json directly from apm.yml + .apm/, so apm-install/apm-workflow/ apm-orchestrate (issue #88, already landed on this branch) fully replace what these two skills did. plugin-author/marketplace-author were deleted in issue #90's execution.
• Translating the existing plugins into apm.yml + .apm/ and running the real conversion was executed under issue #90 (https://git.dev.rkdr.net/Defame1297/holocron/issues/90), which tracks that work through to merge.
• CONTEXT.md's "Plugin"/"Plugin marketplace" glossary entries were rewritten in issue #90 to describe the compiled-output model directly, rather than carrying a forward-pointer to this ADR.

Considered options

Additive/compile-layer only, no apm.yml (rejected). Keep plugin.json/marketplace.json hand-authored and bolt APM on top as an optional extra. Rejected: doesn't achieve the multi-provider compile-reuse goal APM's package model provides, and leaves the existing dual-manifest hand maintenance in place unchanged.

New standalone plugins/apm/ plugin (rejected). plugins/lint/ was split out of kyberforge specifically because Vale tooling is generic and repo-agnostic, not holocron-marketplace-specific (see CONTEXT.md's "lint plugin" entry) — the same argument applies to a generic apm CLI wrapper. The shipped apm-install/apm-workflow skills are, in fact, generic, repo-agnostic APM CLI documentation with no holocron-specific content, so a standalone plugins/apm/ would have been a defensible split on artifact content alone. Rejected anyway, in favor of kyberforge, because holocron is currently the only repo that needs this tooling — standing up a separate plugin for a single consumer isn't worth it yet. Accepted as an explicit tradeoff (same pattern as ADR-0011's gitea-workflow naming tradeoff) — worth revisiting if this tooling is ever reused outside holocron's own conversion.

Content migration out of plugin-author/marketplace-author

A content audit of plugin-author/marketplace-author (same grill-with-docs session as this correction) sorted what they document into three buckets:

• Claude Code platform constraints — carried forward. Facts that stay true regardless of authoring model (reserved plugin-name prefixes; the agents/-directory stray-.md-file validator gotcha, ADR-0010; claude plugin validate as a required terminal check) have been added into apm-workflow's reference docs, since compiled output still has to satisfy these constraints post-conversion.
• Dual-manifest artifacts — obsolete, not carried forward. Conventions that existed only because of hand-authored dual manifests (ADR-0006's version-parity/patch-bump rule, the CC-vs-Copilot field-placement split, dual-file mirroring) are obsolete under apm.yml's single-manifest model and were deliberately dropped.
• Holocron policy choice — resolved in #90. marketplace-author's catalog-version convention (minor bump for package add/remove, patch bump for field-only updates) isn't an APM mechanic — apm doesn't enforce it, and has no native version-bump automation at all — so rather than building a new script, the convention is now documented as guidance inside apm-workflow's reference docs (references/marketplace.md for the root catalog version rule, references/configure.md for the per-package version-bump-on-content-edit rule), applied manually by whoever edits apm.yml.

Consequences

• ADR-0001 is superseded (issue #90).
• ADR-0006 (plugin-version-parity) is moot (issue #90): plugin.json/marketplace.json are now compiled output of a single apm.yml, so there's no second hand-authored file left to keep in parity, and plugin-author — the skill that enforced ADR-0006 — was deleted rather than adapted (see "Content migration" above).
• ADR-0010 (agent sources relocated outside agents dir) was updated (issue #90) for agents now living at plugins/<name>/.apm/agents/*.agent.md — the directory path changed; the pre-existing .agent.md extension convention (ADR-0005/ADR-0010) and project/user scope are unaffected, per ADR-0016.
• ADR-0014 (Vale prefilter ships from the plugin) had its hardcoded plugins/<name>/skills/... paths (the Vale prefilter is skill-scoped only; ADR-0014 never referenced a plugins/<name>/agents/... path) updated for the .apm/ nesting as part of issue #90's execution.
• kyberforge gained three new artifacts (issue #88) before any conversion of existing content happened, then lost two (plugin-author/marketplace-author, deleted once issue #90 verified parity) — net version bump 1.3.1 → 1.4.0. The root marketplace catalog bumped 0.3.1 → 0.3.2 to match.
• ADR-0016 (a narrower decision discovered while designing issue #89) turned out to gate how issue #90 had to re-author plugin-scope agents: .apm/agents/*.agent.md compiles verbatim to both Claude and Copilot, so those files carry only name/description/model/source_keys — existing dual-file <name>.md+<name>.agent.md pairs could not be raw-moved, only re-authored.
• Two follow-up issues tracked the remaining work: #89 (skill-author/agent-author routing adaptation — closed, merged in #93) and #90 (the actual repo conversion, which also deleted plugin-author/marketplace-author — tracked through to merge; treat #90's own state as the authority on whether it has landed, not this line).
• displayName is gone from all six compiled plugin.json files, and owner.email from the marketplace manifest — accepted, not overlooked. apm.yml has no key that compiles to either, so the conversion dropped both: every plugins/<name>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json now carries author/description/homepage/keywords/license/name/repository/version (plus mcpServers for bin) and no displayName, and .claude-plugin/marketplace.json's owner block is {name, url} only. Both fields are optional — plugins/kyberforge/docs/research/docs/claude-code-plugins/api-reference.md:14 lists displayName as Required: No, "Human-readable name shown in plugin manager" — which is why claude plugin validate --strict still passes on all six. The visible cost is that the plugin manager falls back to the bare name as each plugin's label. Accepted as the price of apm.yml being the single authoring source: re-injecting displayName post-compile would mean a second reinject_* workaround of the kind ADR-0017's amendment reserves for fields apm strips on a factually wrong premise, and apm's premise here is simply that the key does not exist in its schema.
• mattpocock-skills is now version-pinned, and the pin is maintained by hand. Pre-conversion the entry was {"repo": "mattpocock/skills", "source": "github"} — an unpinned reference that tracked the upstream default branch, so consumers got whatever was on it at install time. Root apm.yml now declares version: "^1.2.0" for it, which apm pack resolves and freezes into .claude-plugin/marketplace.json as ref: v1.2.3 + an explicit sha. Consumers get a reproducible version instead of a moving target, which is the improvement; the cost is that nothing advances it. apm has no version-bump automation (established under "Versioning" in issue #90's plan), so picking up a new upstream release means a human editing the version: range in root apm.yml and re-running apm pack. Left un-bumped, the marketplace pins an ageing release indefinitely and silently.
• Caveat on "Status: executed" above: issue #90's own execution comment flagged, before merge, that Claude Code's ability to actually load content out of .apm/ was unverified — that caveat turned out to be a real defect, not a formality: the native installer has zero awareness of .apm/ and reported Skills (0) Agents (0) Hooks (0) on every plugin installed from this marketplace. The manifest-compilation deliverable this ADR describes was genuinely complete; runtime discoverability was not. Fixed in ADR-0017 (a second, compiled flat-directory content mirror at each plugin root, generated by scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh) — see that ADR for the root cause and the fix.