What
The plugin hot-reload watcher, which watches plugin files and reloads plugins when they change, gained a "watch collections" abstraction. It now accepts watchRoot/listChildren/reloadPlugins, and exposes watchCollections/watchedCollections alongside its existing per-plugin watch tracking.
The plugin-directory watcher now separately resolves individual plugin paths and plugin-collection (folder-of-plugins) paths, calling watchCollections in addition to the existing watchPlugins, and logs both the watched plugins and the watched collections.
Why
This lets Claude Code detect and hot-reload plugins that live inside a folder of multiple plugins, not just plugins installed individually.
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Trying the plugin with `--plugin-dir` tells you it can work. To find out how often Claude actually reaches for it and gets the right result, run it against a set of test prompts with [`claude plugin eval`](/docs/en/plugin-evals). Each prom…plugins see the edit
* Edits to a plugin you loaded with [`--plugin-dir`](/docs/en/plugins#test-your-plugins-locally) while you develop itdiscover-plugins see the edit
Anthropic's documentation has since written up --plugin-dir, on Discover and install prebuilt plugins through marketplaces.