I tested over 100 Claude Code plugins—here are the 5 that actually matter

Everybody’s raving about Claude Code right now, but if you’ve tried it and felt like the results weren’t living up to the hype, it’s probably not you—it’s the tooling, or lack thereof. Out of the box, Claude Code is a capable generalist with a fairly minimal feature set. You tell it to do something, and it takes a reasonable but generic stab at it. It performs dramatically better when it has specific skills and instructions for the job at hand, and that’s exactly what plugins provide. Now, I’ve tested more than 100 Claude Code plugins and here are five that every vibe coder must install.