Agent Plugins for AWS
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[!IMPORTANT]
Generative AI can make mistakes. You should consider reviewing all output and costs generated by your chosen AI model and agentic coding assistant. See AWS Responsible AI Policy.
What's new
[!TIP]
The Agent Toolkit for AWS is now live! The Agent Toolkit for AWS is the successor to the MCP servers, plugins, and skills available on AWS Labs, and was informed by feedback from customers like you. If you're building production software using coding agents or building agents for your own customers, we recommend Agent Toolkit for AWS. It includes IAM condition keys to distinguish agent actions from human ones, CloudWatch and CloudTrail visibility, and skills that have been evaluated for accuracy and effectiveness. This repo continues to work and accept contributions. Over time, the most useful projects here will move into Agent Toolkit for AWS.
Agent Plugins for AWS
Agent Plugins for AWS equip AI coding agents with the skills to help you architect, deploy, and operate on AWS. Agent plugins are currently supported by Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.
AI coding agents are increasingly used in software development, helping developers write, review, and deploy code more efficiently. Agent skills and the broader agent plugin packaging model are emerging as best practices for steering coding agents toward reliable outcomes without bloating model context. Instead of repeatedly pasting long AWS guidance into prompts, developers can now encode that guidance as reusable, versioned capabilities that agents invoke when relevant. This improves determinism, reduces context overhead, and makes agent behavior easier to standardize across teams. Agent plugins act as containers that package different types of expertise artifacts together. A single agent plugin can include:
- Agent skills – Structured workflows and best-practice playbooks that guide AI through complex tasks like deployment, code review, or architecture planning. Agent skills encode domain expertise as step-by-step processes.
- MCP servers – Connections to external services, data sources, and APIs. MCP servers give your assistant access to live documentation, pricing data, and other resources at runtime. Learn more about MCP servers for AWS.
- Hooks – Automation and guardrails that run on developer actions. Hooks can validate changes, enforce standards, or trigger workflows automatically.
- References – Documentation, configuration defaults, and knowledge that the agent skill can consult. References make agent skills smarter without bloating the prompt.
As new types of expertise artifacts emerge in this space, they can be packaged into agent plugins, making the evolution transparent to developers.
Best practices
To maximize the benefits of plugin-assisted development while maintaining security and code quality, follow these essential guidelines:
- Always review generated code before deployment (for example, against your constraints for security, cost, resilience)
- Use plugins as accelerators, not replacements for developer judgment and expertise.
- Keep plugins updated to benefit from the latest AWS best practices.
- Follow the principle of least privilege when configuring AWS credentials.
- Run security scanning tools on generated infrastructure code.
Plugins
