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
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.