Scenario: solo developer

You work alone, in one coding tool, building on Cratis.

What you do

Install the plugin for your harness. The agent harness guide has the exact command for each one. For Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Cratis/AI
/plugin install cratis@cratis

That is the whole setup. There is no .cratis/ directory to create and no configuration file to commit.

What you get

Your assistant loads Cratis skills when a task matches one: writing a command, modeling an event flow, adding a projection, debugging a stale read model. The skills are Markdown instructions and references. The marketplace plugin adds no hooks, scripts, MCP server, or files in your project.

The plugin carries skills only. It does not install the always-on Cratis rules, the slash-command prompts such as new-vertical-slice, or the subagents. If you want those, run cratis ai install in the repository (see Start using Cratis AI); in Pi, @cratis/pi includes rules and prompts.

Your own configuration stays yours. Keep whatever you already have in .claude/ (or your harness’s equivalent). The plugin does not touch it.

Keeping current

The marketplace plugin reads the current default branch of Cratis/AI. There is no version to pin; updating means updating the plugin in your harness, and going back means uninstalling it. @cratis/pi is the exception: it is published to npm with version numbers. See updates and rollback.

Things to avoid

Do not copy the Cratis/AI repository’s .cratis/ai, .claude, .github, or skill folders into your own repository by hand. The copy goes stale without warning. Use a plugin, or the managed install, which records what it installed and can update it.