Claude Code shipped a few more versions over the last days — and 2.1.157 hides an update that’s especially fun for tinkerers and plugin builders: plugins are now loaded automatically from the .claude/skills folder. No marketplace required.
Plugins Without the Marketplace Detour
Until now, getting your own plugin running was a bit clunky: you needed a marketplace source so Claude Code could find and install it. For quick experiments or project-internal helpers, that was more friction than it needed to be.
With 2.1.157, just drop a plugin into .claude/skills — Claude Code finds and loads it on its own. No registration, no marketplace entry, no detour. Exactly what you want when you just want to try something out real quick.
claude plugin init: Scaffolding in Seconds
On top of that comes a new command: claude plugin init <name> creates a fresh plugin skeleton in .claude/skills. So you don’t have to fumble your way through the folder structure and the required files first — the command handles the setup, and you can get going right away.
For anyone who — like me — enjoys building little tools and MCP integrations, this is a real accelerator. Idea, init, try it out. The friction between a spark of an idea and a working plugin shrinks noticeably.
Autocomplete for /plugin
One more small but neat detail: the /plugin command gets autocomplete. Subcommands, installed plugin names, and plugins from known marketplaces are all suggested. Sounds trivial, but it saves exactly the typing and lookups that otherwise get tedious day to day.
What Else Was in There
The surrounding versions are more maintenance work: 2.1.156 fixes a bug where modified thinking blocks under Opus 4.8 led to API errors. 2.1.158 brings Auto Mode to Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry for Opus 4.7 and 4.8 — via the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_AUTO_MODE=1. And 2.1.159 is pure infrastructure with no visible changes.
The pattern stays the same as always with Claude Code: lots of small steps, no big bang. But the plugin simplification in particular is one of those steps that makes getting into your own tooling pleasantly low-barrier. That’s exactly how building should feel.
Sources: GitHub: Claude Code Releases, Claude Code Changelog