The night before last at 11 p.m., a colleague messaged me: “The plugin is clearly installed. Why can’t I type /deploy?”
I asked him to send a screenshot of /plugin. On the Installed page, the plugin was indeed green. I asked again: does the project’s .claude/settings.json include enabledPlugins? He said yes, and it was committed for the whole team.
That’s exactly where the problem was.
In Claude Code, “I want to use this plugin,” “this machine actually has it installed,” and “the current session has loaded it” are three completely different things. When nothing happens, many people’s first reaction is to uninstall and reinstall. Honestly, most of the time reinstalling doesn’t help, because the blockage is at one of the latter two gates.
I traced through the whole loading chain and turned it into a troubleshooting order. Next time a plugin is installed but silent, follow this order, and you’ll rarely have to guess.
