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Claude Code Issues / #67357

Cowork plugin refresh: no UI to pull upstream changes without remove+reinstall

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jun 11, 2026 by courtneydunbar-1

Summary

Cowork (claude.ai) caches plugin skill files at install time. When a plugin's source repo is updated (new SKILL.md commits), existing installs do not pick up the changes — even after a full remove + reinstall. The \"Last updated\" timestamp in the plugin detail UI is also unreliable (showed \"5 hours ago\" while serving skill files from earlier in the day, across multiple reinstall attempts and 6 merged PRs).

This makes it impossible to iterate on plugin skill content for Cowork users. Every routing fix requires PMs to know to manually reinstall — and reinstall doesn't reliably pull fresh content anyway.

Observed behavior

  1. Merged PR to update SKILL.md in a GitHub-hosted plugin repo.
  2. Removed plugin from Cowork → Customize → Plugins.
  3. Reinstalled via Cowork → Customize → Personal plugins → Add marketplace → Sync.
  4. Plugin detail page shows \"Last updated: 5 hours ago\" — timestamp does not reflect the PR just merged.
  5. Cowork behavior in new conversation matches the pre-PR version of the skill file.

Repeated across 6 sequential PRs over ~5 hours. At no point did reinstall serve the updated skill content reliably.

Requests

  1. Plugin refresh UI in Cowork — a \"Sync\" or \"Update\" button on the plugin detail page that refetches skill files from the source repo, without requiring full remove + reinstall.
  2. Accurate \"Last updated\" timestamp — the timestamp should reflect when Cowork last fetched from the source repo, not something else.
  3. Docs: clarify Cowork plugin install scope — the Claude Code CLI supports user / project / local scope, but Cowork's plugin install behavior (whether it's personal/workspace-scoped or project-scoped) is not documented. Empirically it appears personal-scoped but this should be stated explicitly.
  4. autoUpdate support in Cowork — Claude Code CLI's extraKnownMarketplaces config supports \"autoUpdate\": true. Cowork should honor this or provide an equivalent so plugin maintainers can opt into always-fresh fetching.

Environment

  • Cowork (claude.ai web), Claude Teams account
  • Plugin source: GitHub repo, personal marketplace install
  • Plugin format: .claude-plugin/plugin.json + skills/*/SKILL.md

View original on GitHub ↗