This works pretty well for these coding harnesses though (see Pi). I like the model where the harness ships with minimal tools and you can spin up plugins for extra functionality. You can usually have the model/harness you're using just create the plugin that you need for you. The advantage of this is that these harnesses aren't optimized for their frontier models like claude/codex are so you can fine tune your environment and burn less tokens... having said all that, I haven't tried this one yet.

Plugins are the right solution for software that needs to strictly isolate a stable core domain from an unpredictable long-tail of niche integrations.

Everything about harness design is still experimental and janky. Throw everything in a pit and let the fittest survive. Large opinionated software is unlikely to survive and more likely to give you a migration fatigue

These types of projects can have a happy ending, but only if the product is popular enough and the plugins are essential to the core functionality. Plugins usually die off because the sole maintainer loses interest, but popularity and necessary can bring new maintainers to carry the torch.

Most vendors that create a plugin-based system end up creating a large library of plugins to kickstart the ecosystem, which many users end up trusting those more because they're "official", so they essentially created an mono-vendor ecosystem with extra steps.

If everything is a plugin it means plugins can do everything.

AI can write custom plugins for you. So this means the tool is infinitely flexible for you, even without any community.

Compare this to Zed where I can't make a hexviewer for binary files or player for audio files for myself without recompiling Zed's source code.

For me the problem is not that it has a plugin based architecture. It's that it ONLY has that. If there are no batteries included what's the point?

Sounds like a Linux architecture, innit?