Local skills and plugin development

[dnv-kimbell]

We are using copilot in our enterprise. Another developer has used some AI magic to create a repo containing plugins and skills for our custom platform. I'm trying to extend this with additional skills for the areas I know a lot about.

Installing a plugin from a repo is not optimal when you are doing active development; the inner loop Microsoft has a focus on with other developer tools seems to be missing here.

Yesterday I figured out that it was possible to install a plugin from a folder. Sounded like what I wanted until i discovered that it copied the whole folder structure to a cache somewhere else on my drive. Cached copy makes sense when referencing a repo over the Internet, but when it's already on your drive?

After some more digging, I discovered that I could run /plugin install c:\src\abcd from within the copilot CLI and it would update the cached copy. This worked like a charm yesterday and looked like a practical solution.

When I started up my machine today and tried the same command, the plugin is suddenly locked and the CLI is not able to update it like it did yesterday. My next attempt was to run it from the command line.

copilot plugin install c:\src\abcd
Plugin "abcd" installed successfully. Installed 3 skills.

⚠️  Warning: Direct plugin installs (repos, URLs, local paths) are deprecated. Only plugin@marketplace installs will be supported in a future release.

How are we supposed to do local development moving forward? Do we have to set up some custom scripts that copy files to the correct places?