Session plugins - Kanaeru

Kanaeru doesn’t just start a coding agent and hope for the best. Every Kana session loads the Kanaeru harness: a set of plugins with the skills, specialist agents, rules, and hooks for that kind of work. That’s why a task follows the same process whether Claude Code, Codex, or another runtime runs it.

Core plus one session plugin

Each session loads two plugins:

The core plugin, in every session. It gives Kana her shared process: restoring context when a session resumes, keeping context in sync between tasks, keeping a work diary, guarding commits and branches, and enforcing the sandbox.
The session plugin for that kind of session, and no other. A planning session doesn’t carry execution tools, and an execution session doesn’t carry planning ones, so each agent only sees what its job needs.

What each session plugin adds

Session	What it’s for	What it brings
Vision	Questions and answers, shaping the roadmap	The vision session process, and setting up automations
Refinement	Reordering, merging, and clarifying roadmap items	Backlog refinement, and a single-pass mode for automated refinement
Planning	Tasks, journeys, acceptance criteria, blueprints	Requirements gathering, blueprint and pipeline planning, and agents that stress-test the plan
Review	Reviewing specs, blueprints, and project setup	Behavior-driven scenarios, security checks, skill assessment, and review agents
Task planning	Designing each task’s pipeline	Pipeline planning, skill assessment, and an independent pipeline reviewer
Task execution	The implement, test, and review loop	The implementation, test, and review agents the pipeline runs, plus the task retrospective
Retrospective	Closing the outcome	Retrospective and drift mining
Koa	Running an outcome for you	Koa’s operator process

Automations pick a session profile that runs one of these session plugins. The Native Claude Code session and Native Codex session profiles run with the core plugin only.

Seeing what’s installed

On the machine page, each runtime has a Kanaeru harness bundles list showing how many are installed. Each bundle is tagged core or session and shows Installed bundle with its version, or Needs setup with the reason. A bundle can’t run until its runtime is Ready.

Updates

Session plugins ship inside the signed Agent Manager release, and their version always matches the Agent Manager’s. The Agent Manager checks each bundle’s signature before using it. You update them along with the machine: choose Upgrade agent manager, or turn on Auto-update. There’s no separate update for each plugin.