Cratis AI concepts
Cratis AI is a plugin bundle for your AI coding tool. Most of its vocabulary is just a careful name for something you already know from plugin ecosystems.
| Thing you know | Cratis word | What it is here |
|---|---|---|
| A plugin | profile | A named selection of skills under the cratis/ namespace — cratis/chronicle, cratis/arc/csharp. The marketplace plugin cratis carries every public profile; a profile is how a repository narrows that to exactly what its stack needs. |
| A skill | skill | The same thing: a passive SKILL.md (plus references and assets) your assistant loads when a task matches. No hooks, no executable code. |
| Your dependency manifest | subscription (.cratis/ai.json) | The committed, project-owned record of which profiles the repository expects, at which exact version, for which harnesses. |
| Your project README section | project context (.cratis/PROJECT.md) | Your project facts — what it is, environments, commands, conventions. The shared profiles never own these; your repository does. |
| A release channel | channel | Derived, not declared: cratis/engineering is the maintainer channel, every other cratis/* id is the public channel. The two never mix in one subscription. |
| The plugin marketplace | marketplace | The Cratis/AI repository itself, added as a marketplace source. Its manifests resolve the real skills/ and engineering/ directories on the default branch. |
One paragraph each, in the order you meet them:
- A profile is just a bundle declaration. Install the plugin and you get
every public one; subscribe in
.cratis/ai.jsonwhen a repository needs a narrower, reviewable scope — see Profiles. - A skill never executes anything. It is guidance your model reads — the same bytes in every harness.
- A subscription belongs to the consuming repository, never to a package. Packages may read it; nothing may write it for you.
- Project context is where your facts live so shared skills can stay generic. Keep credentials out of it, always.
- A channel answers “who is this guidance for”: everyone (
public) or Cratis maintainers (cratis-engineering). The namespace tells you which.
For install commands per host, see the agent harness guide.