Desktop app: bundled @inline plugins (marketing, product-management, ...) re-enable on every restart; UI disable and enabledPlugins:false don't persist

Summary

The Claude Desktop app (Cowork) ships bundled "inline" plugins: marketing@inline, product-management@inline, human-resources@inline, operations@inline, zoom-plugin@inline. There is no way to disable or remove them permanently: they re-enable on every app restart, regardless of whether they were disabled/removed in the app UI or explicitly disabled in ~/.claude/settings.json.

Environment

• Windows 10 Home 10.0.19045, Russian locale
• Claude Desktop app 1.8089.0 (%LOCALAPPDATA%\AnthropicClaude\app-1.8089.0)
• Claude Code CLI 2.1.233

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the Desktop app (Cowork mode). Sessions include the bundled plugin skill sets (~65 skills: campaign-plan, write-spec, …) and their MCP servers (plugin:marketing:ahrefs, plugin:product-management:asana, …).
2. Disable/remove the marketing and product-management plugins in the app UI.
3. Alternatively (or additionally) add explicit disables to ~/.claude/settings.json:

``json
"enabledPlugins": {
"marketing@inline": false,
"product-management@inline": false
}
``

1. Restart the Desktop app.

Expected

The disabled state persists: bundled plugins stay off after restart, matching the documented enabledPlugins behavior for other plugins (plugins-reference: managed > user > project precedence).

Actual

After every restart the bundled plugins are enabled again. The settings.json file itself survives the restart (the false entries are still there), but they have no effect on @inline plugins.

Details observed while debugging

• The @inline plugins are not visible to the plugin system at all: claude plugin list does not show them, and they are absent from ~/.claude/plugins/installed_plugins.json and the plugins cache.
• No local file stores their enabled state: not in ~/.claude/settings.json, settings.local.json, %APPDATA%\Claude\* (searched for marketing@inline). They appear only in pluginUsage inside ~/.claude.json (usage counters, not state).
• The plugin bodies appear to be bundled inside the app distribution (resources/app.asar), so there is nothing on disk to remove.
• The @inline mechanism is not mentioned in the docs (checked plugins-reference, settings, plugins, desktop pages and the support article on plugins).

Impact

The bundled skill descriptions (~65 skills) are injected into every Cowork session's context (~10k tokens per session) with no way to opt out. Plugin state the user sets is silently reverted, which also erodes trust in enabledPlugins as a mechanism.

Ask

Either honor enabledPlugins: false for @inline plugins, or persist the UI disable state across restarts, or document the supported way to turn the bundled set off.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code