No way to opt out of bundled marketplace plugins (code-simplifier, etc.)

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 1, 2026 by tuncay Closed Mar 4, 2026

Description

Claude Code auto-clones the official marketplace repo (anthropics/claude-plugins-official) on every startup into ~/.claude/plugins/marketplaces/. Bundled plugins from the plugins/ directory (like code-simplifier) are automatically loaded as agents/skills, even when:

  • enabledPlugins is {} in settings.json
  • installed_plugins.json has no plugins
  • known_marketplaces.json is manually emptied to {}

The marketplace repo is re-cloned on startup regardless of known_marketplaces.json state, and groveConfigCache with grove_enabled is re-set to true on every startup even after being manually cleared.

Observed Behavior

  1. known_marketplaces.json is overwritten on startup — emptying it does nothing
  2. groveConfigCache.grove_enabled is re-set to true on startup
  3. officialMarketplaceAutoInstalled is re-set to true on startup
  4. Bundled plugins from plugins/ directory (e.g., code-simplifier) load regardless of enabledPlugins setting — this setting only controls external_plugins/
  5. There is no documented or undocumented way to prevent this

Expected Behavior

Users should be able to opt out of auto-loaded marketplace plugins. A setting like "enableBundledPlugins": false in settings.json, or respecting enabledPlugins: {} for bundled plugins too, would solve this.

Environment

  • Platform: Linux (Arch)
  • Claude Code: 2.1.63

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