Plugins

The core is your notes plus three commands: ingest, recall, and check. Every other behavior is a plugin you add when you want it and remove with one command.

The one rule

The core never knows a plugin exists. Plugins know about the core. The core knows nothing about them.

The litmus for the whole contract:

You can add or remove any plugin without editing a single line of core code.

If adding a plugin forces you to touch the core, the plugin is wrong, not the core. This is the rule that keeps imprnt from slowly growing to know about every plugin, which is what bloats this kind of system over time.

A plugin depends on exactly two things: your vault/ notes (and their frontmatter format) and its own sibling folder. Not core internals, not another plugin, not another plugin’s folder.

Add and remove

Each plugin is its own package, imprnt-plugin-<name>. Installing one copies its files into your project’s plugins/<name>/ and wires one import line into CLAUDE.local.md, your per-machine toggle file.

imprnt plugin list            # installed plugins and official ones available to add
imprnt plugin add anti-slop   # fetch, copy in, wire the import line
imprnt plugin rm anti-slop    # unwire it (add --purge to delete the folder too)

A fresh clone with no CLAUDE.local.md loads zero plugins. Opt-in for real. You can also hand-edit that file, it stays the single source of truth for what is on.

The gallery

Plugin	What it adds
anti-slop	Rules that keep your assistant’s prose from reading like AI.
character	A voice and standards to write in. Scribe is the default you copy and make yours.
whenful	A live mirror of your Whenful tasks, shown inline when you read a note.
guard	A hook that blocks dangerous shell commands before they run.
statusline	A status line: model, branch, context, cost, rate-limit windows, clock.
telegram	Your vault from your phone. Text a bot, the answer comes from your notes.
kleinanzeigen	A marketplace inbox watcher. Code sorts hostile messages, the model drafts the residue, you press send.
session-host	A warm browser that holds your logged-in sessions and brokers a fresh token over localhost.

The contract

A handful of rules keep plugins composable and the core blind.

• Reads the format, not the code. A plugin opens your notes and reads the frontmatter like any script would. The core guarantees the note format stays stable and publishes no importable code as a contract.
• Single writer per path. A plugin writes only inside its own folder. To change a note it hands you a suggested edit you approve through ingest. Exactly one thing ever writes your notes.
• Search stays on your vault. recall only ever looks at your real notes, never plugin folders, never raw/. For something findable, a plugin proposes a real note you approve. That is the only path in.
• Everything is a command you run. Nothing runs in the background by being installed. Want hourly sync? You schedule it.
• Slug-namespaced labels. Any label a plugin adds to a note is prefixed with its name (whenful.synced), and it reads only its own. The core ignores labels it does not recognize.

Three classes of plugin

• Data plugins keep a local mirror of an outside service and refresh it with a sync command you run. They propose summary notes into the vault, never write directly. Whenful and the kleinanzeigen watcher are examples.
• Behavior plugins hand the assistant a fixed chunk of text you wire into its prompt. The vault never force-feeds the assistant. Remove is deleting the line. anti-slop and character are examples. There is no referee for conflicting behaviors, you own composition.
• Harness plugins customize the assistant’s runtime: a hook that blocks dangerous commands, the status line. Same folder, same on-off switch. Stock claude stays stock, the flags exist only on sessions you start with imp.

How the core touches plugins

In exactly two places, both dumb and uniform, discovered by filename convention:

• imprnt check --all runs the core check, then runs each plugins/*/check.js and reads its exit code only, forwarding the plugin’s own output. It never parses or interprets what a plugin says.
• imprnt ingest --apply files a pre-enriched note a plugin has staged in plugins/*/proposed/. The propose-then-approve path, made concrete.

Neither imports a plugin or names one. The fence: the core may provide read-only aggregation, never write or orchestration.