A versioned package of agent context and extensions, installed and updated as one unit — the unit of trade in the supply layer. tessl calls it a plugin, and the comparison it reaches for is the right one: “Everything in a plugin is installed, versioned, and updated as one unit, much like a package in npm or pip.”
What it carries is broader than instructions:
- Skills — procedural workflows loaded when the task matches (artifact-skill-doc).
- Rules — standards applied to every task, always on.
- MCP servers — live tools and data, not just text.
- Hooks — deterministic commands bound to agent lifecycle events (
PreToolUse,PostToolUse,UserPromptSubmit,SessionStart,Stop). - Evals — the scenarios it is graded against, kept with the thing they grade (artifact-eval-suite).
That composition is the interesting part. A bundle is not only context; through hooks and MCP servers it extends the harness itself, so installing one from a registry changes the agent’s execution primitives and not just its prompt. The supply layer reaches down into the harness layer at exactly this point.
Why it is a separate artifact from artifact-skill-doc. A SKILL.md is one piece of process knowledge. A bundle is a release: it has a version, a changelog, an owner, a visibility setting, a security score, an eval suite, and a rollback path. The wiki already records frameworks shipping through marketplaces (superpowers, addy-agent-skills, compound-engineering, pstack); this is the shape they ship as, and paging it separately is what lets the layer say that the framework bundle is coming apart into independently versioned parts.
Produced by (backlinks)
Tessl:
- tessl-plugin — creates, lints, packs, inspects, publishes, unpublishes, and archives the bundle;
tessl plugin newscaffolds it andtessl plugin packproduces the distributable. - tessl-skill —
tessl skill importpromotes a standalone skill into a bundle, which is the prerequisite for evaluating it. - tessl-install — consumes it: install, pin, list, check outdated, update, roll back.
See Also
- artifact-skill-doc — the single unit of process knowledge a bundle packages.
- artifact-eval-suite — shipped inside the bundle, graded against it.
- artifact-standards — rules travel in the bundle alongside skills.
- pattern-supply-chain-scanning — what gets scanned before one is installed.