The operator's layer
skills · plugins · persistent memory · hooks — the four surfaces that make Cowork yours
Out of the box Cowork is a generic agent. The interesting version — the one that knows your project conventions, invokes your team's playbooks by name, remembers your past corrections, and gates risky tools through a hook — is the version you build on top of it. Four surfaces do the building.
Skills are reusable playbooks — a markdown file with a trigger and a body. Plugins are packaged extensions, from the marketplace or your private folder. Persistent memory is a file-based store the agent reads at the start of every session. Hooks are pre/post-tool shell commands wired into settings.json that fire deterministically around agent actions.
None of these are documented as "advanced." All four are foundational the moment you have two people running the same workflow. This module is how to think about each, with the file shapes that actually work.
// Anthropic's launch keynote — the skills + plugins demo. Watch on YouTube →