[BUG] Claude Desktop: knowledge-work-plugins installed on the account have no remove or disable control on any surface

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

17 plugins from the account-scoped marketplace knowledge-work-plugins (bio-research, customer-support, data, design, engineering, enterprise-search, finance, human-resources, legal, marketing, operations, pdf-viewer, product-management, productivity, sales, small-business, cowork-plugin-management) are loaded into every Claude Code session in the desktop app. There is no supported way to remove or disable any of them.

No control in the UI. The Skills panel (Skills → Your skills) lists each plugin's skills with the plugin name as a badge, but exposes no per-skill or per-plugin remove, disable or uninstall action — no row menu, no action on the row, nothing under the row's detail. The Add control only adds.

No CLI fallback. These plugins are injected into the session via repeated --plugin-dir <app-support>/local-agent-mode-sessions/<session>/rpm/plugin_<id> flags, built from rpm/manifest.json. They are therefore invisible to the CLI:

$ claude plugin list          # lists only marketplace-installed plugins; none of the 17 appear
$ claude plugin disable bio-research
✘ Failed to disable plugin "bio-research": Plugin "bio-research" not found in any editable settings scope. Use plugin@marketplace format.

plugin@marketplace form does not help either, because the plugins are not registered in any editable settings scope — ~/.claude/settings.json enabledPlugins only covers marketplace installs.

Every entry in rpm/manifest.json is "installedBy": "user", "installationPreference": "available" — i.e. user-installed and nominally removable — yet no removal path exists on either surface.

Impact

Roughly 140 skills and ~30 MCP servers the user never authorized are loaded into every session. On the Codex side, which reads the same skills, this produces:

warning: Skill descriptions were shortened to fit the skills context budget. Codex can still see every skill, but some descriptions are shorter. Disable unused skills or plugins to leave more room for the rest.

Shortened descriptions degrade automatic skill selection. The warning tells the user to disable unused plugins, but there is no way to do so. Removing the equivalent plugins on the Codex side (codex plugin remove <name>@claude-cowork) works and took the session from 262 to 121 skills, which makes the gap on the desktop side more visible.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Have the knowledge-work-plugins plugins installed on the account (they appear to arrive by default).
2. Open Claude Desktop → Code → Skills panel → "Your skills".
3. Try to remove or disable any of them, or the plugin that provides them.
4. Try the CLI: claude plugin list, claude plugin disable <name>.

Expected Behaviour

Either a remove/disable control per plugin in the Skills panel, or these plugins being visible and manageable through claude plugin list / claude plugin disable.

Environment

• Claude Desktop 1.46388.4
• Claude Code 2.1.263
• macOS 26.5.1 (Darwin 25.5.0), Apple silicon

Related

Possibly related to #85218, which reports that uninstall does not persist for account-scoped marketplace plugins. This report is about the step before that: for knowledge-work-plugins there is no uninstall affordance to begin with.