Duplicate code-reviewer agent across multiple plugins wastes ~4,200 tokens

[smartwatermelon]

Problem

Three plugins contain identical code-reviewer.md files (MD5: 71825e620a8e1c7eae9a089b580b4e19):

• comprehensive-review/1.2.1/agents/code-reviewer.md (8,400 bytes)
• tdd-workflows/1.2.1/agents/code-reviewer.md (8,400 bytes)
• code-documentation/1.2.0/agents/code-reviewer.md (8,400 bytes)

Impact

Users with multiple plugins enabled waste ~4,200 tokens loading the same agent 3 times.

Workaround

Local symlinks to deduplicate until plugins are fixed.

Suggested Fix

Remove duplicates - keep in comprehensive-review only, or use a shared agents location.

[wshobson]

Thanks for the detailed report. I investigated and confirmed the issue is actually more extensive than reported:

Duplicated agents found:

Agent	Size	Copies	Plugins
code-reviewer.md	8,400 bytes	6	comprehensive-review, code-documentation, code-refactoring, codebase-cleanup, git-pr-workflows, tdd-workflows
security-auditor.md	9,366 bytes	4	comprehensive-review, full-stack-orchestration, security-scanning, security-compliance
test-automator.md	10,623 bytes	4	codebase-cleanup, full-stack-orchestration, unit-testing, performance-testing-review
debugger.md	781 bytes	4	error-debugging, unit-testing, error-diagnostics, debugging-toolkit

Total potential waste: ~104KB (~26K tokens) if all affected plugins are enabled.

Decision: Accepting duplication for now

After researching Claude Code's plugin architecture, there isn't a good pattern for sharing agents across plugins:

• Plugins are designed as independent, self-contained units
• No native support for shared agent locations or plugin dependencies
• Path traversal (../shared/) fails after installation since external files aren't copied to the cache
• A strict: false marketplace restructure would work but risks breaking existing users

The proposed plugin dependencies feature (anthropics/claude-code#9444) would solve this cleanly, but it's still in proposal stage.

Your local symlink workaround is a reasonable approach for your own setup. I'll revisit this if Claude Code adds native sharing support.