Positioning for the Agentic Era: Plugins skills auto discovering

[crazidev]

As DartNative grows, AI agents may not automatically know how to use every installed official or community plugin. Plugin-provided agent skills could teach agents how to use a plugin, follow best practices, and understand its limitations.

Which approach do you prefer?

Option 1 — Automatic discovery via dn pub get

Discover skills from installed plugins during dn pub get and make them available in .agent/skills/.

Pros: Automatic and works as part of the normal dependency workflow.
Consideration: Skills need to stay in sync when dependencies change.

Option 2 — VS Code command

Add “DartNative: Discover Plugin Agentic Skills” to manually discover and install skills.

Pros: Gives users more explicit control.
Consideration: Requires users to run it and is less convenient outside VS Code.

Scope

“DartNative: Install MCP Server” would remain focused on dartnative_mcp and its own skills. Plugin-provided skills would be handled separately.

I'd love honest feedback from the DartNative team and community on which approach makes the most sense.

[rafajmg]

Thanks for starting this, and for what you've built around DartNative so far!

Here are the team's thoughts so far.

Whichever option we pick, skills should live inside each plugin, next to its code. That's how Dart packages already do it with the Dart team's skills tool, and it means a skill always matches the plugin version you have installed. Our own plugins will ship their skills this way.

Option 1 is the easiest, because skills just show up. Our worry is that dn pub get would add instructions your agent follows without you ever seeing them.

Option 2 gives developers more control. Our concern is that it's not automatic: you'd need to run the command again every time you add or upgrade a plugin. If you forget, your agent ends up working with missing or outdated skills. One suggestion if we go with this approach: the command could run the Dart skills tool under the hood, allowing developers who don't use VS Code to achieve the same result directly from the terminal.

We haven't picked a side yet, and we'd love to hear your thoughts.