Loooom: A Claude Code Plugin Marketplace on GitHub
Update (Feb 22): Loooom pivoted to a GitHub-native Claude Code plugin marketplace. The architecture is simpler and more powerful — skip to The Pivot if you want the new stuff. The vision hasn't changed.
Agent skills are all the rage right now. If you haven't seen them yet — they're structured documents that teach AI agents how to do things the way you do them. Claude, GPT, Gemini, whatever comes next. Skills are what turn a generic AI into something that actually knows what it's doing.
I've been thinking a lot about skills lately. The actual things people know how to do — the sourdough method a baker spent ten years perfecting, the way a drummer feels a fill before playing it, the research framework a professor uses that somehow makes everything click for her students.
Right now, all of that knowledge is locked up. It lives in people's heads, in scattered blog posts, in YouTube comments nobody will ever find. And if you want to teach your AI agent any of it? Good luck.
I'm a developer, so I can figure it out. But it doesn't work for the pastry chef. Or the music teacher. Or the herbalist who knows more about plant medicine than any textbook. The people with the most valuable knowledge are the least likely to be on GitHub.
That's why I built Loooom.
What It Is
Loooom is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. A plugin is a bundle of skills — structured markdown documents that teach your AI agent how to do something the way a real expert does it. Not a generic prompt. Someone's actual methodology, their frameworks, their taste, their experience.
6 plugins live today:
| Plugin | What it teaches |
|---|---|
| 🇯🇵 Beginner Japanese | Conversational Japanese for traveling in Japan |
| 🎨 Kana ASCII | Hiragana/katakana as ASCII art with stroke order |
| 📚 Learn Anything | Benjamin Franklin's autodidact method |
| 🏛️ Socratic Thinking | Plato's method for questioning assumptions |
| 🎤 Persuasive Writing | Lincoln's Gettysburg Address techniques |
| ✨ Frontend Design | A specific aesthetic philosophy for UI |
Browse them all at loooom.xyz/browse.
Use It in 2 Commands
# Step 1: Add the marketplace (once)
/plugin marketplace add mager/loooom
# Step 2: Install any plugin
/plugin install beginner-japanese@loooomThat's it. No account. No signup. No npm. Works right now in Claude Code.
Once installed, the skill activates automatically. Open a Claude Code session and say "teach me Japanese" — it just works.
The Pivot {#the-pivot}
I started building Loooom as a custom social platform — SvelteKit frontend, Neon Postgres database, full user auth system, content-addressed versioning. A real product.
Then Anthropic shipped the Claude Code plugin marketplace spec.
The spec is simple: put a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file in any GitHub repo, and Claude Code can read it as a catalog. Users add your marketplace with /plugin marketplace add your-username/your-repo. That's it. GitHub becomes your database. Git becomes your version control. No infrastructure required.
I looked at what I was building and realized: I was rebuilding GitHub for skills. Storage, versioning, access control, auth, discovery — GitHub already does all of this, for free, at massive scale.
So I pivoted. The mager/loooom repo is the marketplace. The .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file is the catalog. The plugins/ directory is where the actual plugin content lives. Loooom.xyz becomes the beautiful discovery layer — the browsable UI that non-technical people can actually use.
GitHub = database. No servers to maintain. No DB bills. No sync logic.
The question I had to answer: do you need to do anything special to create a Claude Code marketplace? Nope. Just a public GitHub repo and that JSON file. No registration, no approval process, no dashboard. Claude Code finds it directly from GitHub via git clone.
For the curious, the whole catalog lives here: github.com/mager/loooom/blob/main/.claude-plugin/marketplace.json
You Might Meet Your Next Hero Here
Here's what excites me most: this doesn't have to be about famous people.
Sure, the historical skills are fun — we built Benjamin Franklin's self-education method (the guy was a printer's apprentice who taught himself everything), Plato's Socratic questioning, Lincoln's speechwriting framework. Those are genuinely useful.
But the real magic? It's the person you've never heard of. The retired physics teacher in Kansas who has this insane way of explaining quantum mechanics through cooking metaphors. The teenager in Tokyo who writes the best manga panel composition guide you've ever read. The nurse practitioner who built a patient communication framework that actually works.
You might meet your next hero on Loooom. Not because they're famous, but because they know something nobody else has written down yet.
The Principles
Skills are always free. Non-negotiable. Knowledge wants to be free.
Open format. GitHub-native. Not locked to any platform, model, or company.
Open source. The whole codebase is at github.com/mager/loooom. Fork the platform too, if you want.
Beautiful. Skills are readable, well-structured markdown. The code itself is content.
The Tech (For the Nerds)
The marketplace:
.claude-plugin/marketplace.jsoninmager/loooom— Claude Code reads this as the catalogplugins/[name]/directories withplugin.jsonmanifests andskills/subdirectories- GitHub = version control, storage, auth for plugin content
- Adding a new plugin = add a directory + update two files + push
The website:
- SvelteKit 5 + TypeScript → Vercel
src/lib/plugins.ts— static catalog that drives the UI (no DB for plugin data)- Neon Postgres + Drizzle — kept for user profiles and skill content
- GitHub OAuth — replacing X OAuth (planned)
- Playwrite IT Moderna — the font that gives you goosebumps
The Name
Loooom. Four o's. Like extra yarn on the spool.
A loom is where threads become fabric. Loooom is where knowledge becomes skills. My wife knits, and I love the idea that this platform feels more like a yarn shop than a tech company. Warm. Inviting. A place where you want to sit down and write.
What's Next
Landing page + plugin browser✅GitHub-native marketplace (✅/plugin marketplace add mager/loooom)6 plugins live✅- GitHub OAuth — verified profiles from your existing GitHub account
- Community submissions — PR your plugin into
mager/loooom - Search and discovery on loooom.xyz
- Author profile pages with their full plugin catalog
- Loooom Studio — a web editor for writing plugins without touching code
If you want to contribute a plugin, the repo is open. Submit a PR to mager/loooom with your plugins/your-plugin/ directory and I'll review it.
We will always use AI to be creative. Skills are how we teach it our creativity back.
Loooom is open source and always will be. Skills are free and always will be. The loom is open.