Extending Your Agent
Out of the box, an AI assistant is generic. The same base model becomes a far better collaborator once you wrap tooling around it — turning a plain chatbot into a harness tuned to your project. The main extension points to know:
- Skills — reusable packaged capabilities (instructions plus scripts) the loads on demand, so your know-how is available without re-explaining it every .
- Plugins — bundles that ship skills, commands, hooks, and connectors together as one installable unit.
- (Model Context Protocol) — an open standard for connecting the agent to external tools and data (databases, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces — the standard menus of commands other software exposes), your file system) through one common interface.
- Subagents — specialized helper agents the main agent spawns for focused work (search, review, a long side-quest), each with its own .
- Hooks — scripts that fire automatically at lifecycle events (before a command runs, after a file is edited), so you can enforce rules or inject context deterministically.
- Slash commands — short named workflows you invoke with
/name, collapsing a repeated multi-step request into one keystroke.
You don't need all of these on day one. Start plain, and add a skill or a slash command the moment you notice yourself repeating the same setup. A useful rule of thumb: the third time you type the same multi-step instruction, turn it into a slash command; the first time you wish the agent could reach a tool it can't, look for an MCP server for it. Hooks, in particular, return in the guardrails chapter as a way to enforce your rules instead of just hoping the AI remembers them.