Introduction
Before you start
To build and publish a plugin you need:
- Industy knowledge. Know what pain point you are solving for customers in your chosen niche!
- A CableKnit publisher account — apply here
- Basic familiarity with JSON
- An understanding of state machine concepts (states and transitions) and AI
No programming experience is required for basic plugins. For advanced use cases involving custom service classes, you’ll work with CableKnit directly.
CableKnit is an AI-powered operations platform. It handles the hard parts of workflow automation — Decisions, notifications, audit trails, escalations, inbound and outbound email, and push notifications so your customers’ operations teams can focus on doing their jobs.
As a publisher, you build plugins: bundles of skills, automations, and documentation that extend CableKnit for a specific industry, client, or use case. When a company installs your plugin, they get fully working automations running on CableKnit’s infrastructure without you having to build any of it.
What you build
A plugin is a .sweater bundle — a folder containing:
- Skills — instructions that shape how the AI behaves in chat for your use case
- Automations — state machine workflow definitions that run when triggered by an event, schedule, or webhook
- Data Tools — functions the AI can call to query your plugin’s data store, connected services, or bundled reference tables
- Artifact Blueprints — templates that define structured output schemas for documents, reports, and charts
- Documentation — help content shown to the companies that install your plugin
- Screenshots — marketplace listing images that showcase your plugin
That’s it. No servers to run. No auth to implement. No mobile apps to build. You define the workflow logic; CableKnit provides everything else and makes sure you get paid.
What CableKnit provides
When your automation runs, it has access to the full CableKnit platform:
- Decisions — pause a workflow and present a structured decision to a human. They see it in the CableKnit Mac app and iOS Decision Queue. You get the outcome back as a condition in your workflow.
- Notifications — send email, in-app, or SMS notifications at any workflow step
- Slack and Teams — post messages directly to your customer’s Slack channels or Teams
- Artifacts — produce documents, spreadsheets, reports, charts, and email drafts that are attached to the run and visible to reviewers
- Inbound email — trigger automations from incoming email and reply to resume a paused run
- AI tools — built-in tools for employee lookup, file transformation, spreadsheet editing, and querying connected services
- Connectors — subscribe to events from Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Workspace, DocuSign, Procore, Slack, Microsoft 365, and more
How it works end to end
- A company installs your plugin from the CableKnit Marketplace
- Your automation templates are instantiated as live automations for that company
- A trigger fires (an email arrives, a schedule fires, a connector event occurs)
- CableKnit runs your workflow definition step by step
- When a step requires human input, a Decision Request is created and pushed to the right person on the company’s team
- That team member reviews and decides the next step for the automation via a simple form on our Mac app, iOS app, Android app, or the website.
- The workflow resumes and continues to completion
Your workflow logic runs the same way for every company that installs your plugin. You build it once and get paid per company.