Kinds
Kinds are workflow contracts: which artifacts a topic declares, who owns each, and the instructions an agent follows to write it. Built-in kinds, your own kinds, and the marketplace.
2 min read · On this page: What a kind declares · Your own kinds · Enforcing owners · The marketplace · A kind ships as a plugin
#What a kind declares
A kind is a contract a topic follows. It names the artifact slots the topic expects, and for each slot: an owner (a role name such as reviewer, or chat for the agent), an optional schema, whether it is required, a description, and instructions for producing it. It also carries instructions for the topic as a whole: how a session on a topic of this kind should run.
Two kinds are built in and present in every workspace: note, with one summary slot, and skill, which holds a skill's files. They cannot be changed.
#Your own kinds
An owner or admin of a workspace creates a kind under Kinds: a name in lowercase words joined by dashes, a description, then slots one by one. A kind belongs to the workspace that made it; another workspace does not see it until it is published.
A good kind encodes how your team actually works. The one den runs itself on is spec-driven-build: north_star says why, status says where we are, journal is the dated evidence, gotchas holds the traps, and every session reads status first and writes the journal last.
#Enforcing owners
A kind may set enforce owner. Then a write to a declared slot must name the slot's owner, so a reviewer's artifact is written by the reviewer role and nobody else.
#The marketplace
A kind can be published to the den-wide Marketplace with a title, a description, a category, and tags. A member's listing waits for staff review; a staff listing is approved at once and marked official. Any workspace installs a copy, which remembers where it came from and shows an Update button when the listing moves on. The wizard on first sign-in suggests kinds from the categories you picked.
#A kind ships as a plugin
An official listing that carries a plugin block (a trigger line, a triage table, examples, what to ask on a fresh workspace, and a sentence per tool) ships as a plugin of its own. den's plugin catalog then lists den-<kind>: a connector at /mcp/<kind>, the same server and tools with the kind's words on each, and a skill generated from the listing at /skill/<kind>.md. A new listing version is a new plugin version. den-household is the first. Community listings keep the generic plugin until review reads plugin text.
Connect an agent shows the install.