Hooks are the governance bedrock of the AI-native SDLC — deterministic gates that intercept agent actions and block them if conditions aren't met. This lesson walks from a single production-gate script to full enterprise managed settings covering permission lockdown, sandboxing, credential isolation, and marketplace allowlists. The most technically dense lesson in the entire course.
Anthropic's Claude Academy offers a free 14-lesson course that takes AI-assisted coding from 'individuals using Claude Code' to 'an organization-wide development lifecycle.' Four core concepts — intent.md, CLAUDE.md, Skills, and Hooks — wire together into a complete AI-native SDLC.
OMP unifies hooks, skills, MCP, and marketplace into a cohesive extensibility layer: hooks merge into extension runner's event bus, skills use description for semantic triggering, MCP adopts a 250ms fast-start gate with deferred fallback, marketplace supports dual scopes with Claude Code catalog compatibility.
Complete Extension system analysis: Extension interface definition, onLoad/onUnload lifecycle, four major Hooks (onAgentStart/onBeforeToolCall/onAfterToolCall/onTurnEnd), five extension points (tools/commands/keybindings/ui/settings), ExtensionRunner load order and dependency resolution, ExtensionAPI capabilities, Dynamic Border, Widget, Dialog, Selector UI components, Extension inter-communication, hot reload mechanism, official example Extensions.
Complete analysis of pi-coding-agent's 8 core tools: ToolDefinition (for LLM) vs AgentTool (execution logic), createToolDefinition/createTool Factory, executionMode determines parallel/sequential, beforeToolCall/afterToolCall interception chain, withFileMutationQueue serializes file writes, truncateHead/Line/Tail output truncation, read/write/edit/bash/grep/find/ls/powershell implementation details.
Hooks govern control flow, skills inject knowledge, and plugins package both. looplane now has opt-in deny-only project hooks, a bounded SKILL.md loader, exact enabled_skills selection, plugin manifests/install/list, and external-runtime projection. Input rewriting, full lifecycle coverage, remote registries, and a mature marketplace remain open.
Looplane treats skills as bounded repository-local guidance, hooks as opt-in host commands that can only deny, and local plugin manifests as packages for skills and hooks; their authority is deliberately different.
Kiro has five tiers: Free 50 credits, Pro $20/1,000, Pro+ $40/2,000, Pro Max $100/5,000, and Power $200/10,000, with add-on credits at $0.04. Auto mode mixes models to cut cost (the same task costs 1.3x credits via Sonnet), and the spec-driven flow turns vibe coding into traceable, structured development.
The agent loop is a serialized per-session run. The part worth studying is how it handles concurrency: an admitted run records an activeWriterRunId claim, every transcript write supplies expectedWriterRunId, and the commit transaction verifies the match — so a superseded run cannot commit stale data.
Plugins add distribution, not new capabilities: they collect skills, agents, hooks, and MCP settings scattered across .claude/ into one manifest-backed directory that marketplaces can install, update, and version-pin. This post covers plugin structure, the minimal build flow, publishing a marketplace, and dependency version constraints.
Hooks are Claude Code's event system. They trigger shell commands, HTTP requests, MCP tools, or LLM evaluations automatically before/after tool execution, when a prompt is submitted, or when a task ends. Use them to block dangerous operations, run automated reviews, inject context, or write audit logs.