How fast is the Claude Code plugin ecosystem actually growing?

Plugin-touching commit activity grew 8.8x in the six months after the initial launch.

Researchers studied 1,926 repositories hosting plugin marketplaces, covering 8,351 plugins across 2,018 marketplaces and 77,773 commits.

These are maintained artifacts rather than write-once files. Feature commits run at 39.6% against 17.2% for conventional open source.

Software engineering tasks account for 61.3% of all plugins, and Claude co-authors 34.9% of every commit in the dataset.

Natural-language instruction files and their implementation scripts co-evolve at above-chance rates, and 78% of those co-changes are functionally coupled. Prose and code have become one versioned unit, a maintenance dependency with no analogue in traditional software.

Paper: https://t.co/Onf2JVThvr

Chat with Paper: https://t.co/am3hnzI7sn