What each family solves

Start with the baseline

Three plugins are the strongly recommended starting set. Take all three, then add families against a problem you have today:

Plugin	Why it is in the baseline
`magpie-setup`	Install this one first — nothing else works without it. It is what installs, upgrades, configures and adopts everything else, and it carries the secure-isolation skills that sandbox your agent.
`magpie-agent-guard`	The deterministic pre-execution guard: a hook that inspects each shell command before it runs and denies the dangerous shapes outright. It is not a family and has no skills of its own — it is a safety net under whatever else you install.
`magpie-utilities`	`list-skills`, so you can see what is actually installed, plus skill authoring and a path to report framework bugs upstream. Small, and the thing you reach for when something is not behaving.

This is not an arbitrary recommendation: it is exactly the set a project commits as its floor when it adopts Magpie (Installation or Adoption?). What a project recommends to everyone who clones it is what you should have yourself.

Isolation belongs here too. It is not a plugin but a run — Step 3 of the quick start — and it ships inside magpie-setup.

The ten families

Skills ship in ten families. Install the ones that match a problem you have today — you are not meant to take all of them.

Plugin	Skills	The problem it solves	What it offers
`magpie-setup`	10	Your agent can read every credential on your machine, and you have no way to tell whether it is sandboxed right now.	A filesystem sandbox, a clean-env wrapper, a status line that shows sandbox state, and a red banner before any bypass. Plus install, upgrade, and drift checks. You must install this one first — it is what installs everything else.
`magpie-security`	15	Security reports arrive by mail and must be triaged, fixed, and disclosed on a clock — with nothing leaking early.	A 16-step lifecycle: intake from the mailbox, validity triage, canned responses, fix drafting, CVE allocation, advisory and publication. Drafts land in Gmail; nothing is ever sent for you.
`magpie-release-management`	10	An ASF release is a long checklist where one missed step invalidates the vote.	RC cut, RC verification (signatures, hashes, LICENSE/NOTICE, no stray binaries), the `[VOTE]` thread, the tally, promotion, `[ANNOUNCE]`, archive sweep, audit log. The agent never holds your signing key and never publishes.
`magpie-pr-management`	8	The PR queue grows faster than you can read it, and the oldest ones quietly rot.	Queue triage into ready / needs-review / waiting-on-author, deep code review with blocking vs non-blocking findings, reviewer routing, express-lane merge, stale sweep, and queue statistics.
`magpie-issue`	8	A backlog full of duplicates, unreproducible reports, and issues nobody has read in a year.	Triage with proposed labels, duplicate clustering, reproduction attempts across versions, fix drafting, reassessment of old issues, stale sweep, and backlog stats.
`magpie-repo-health`	7	Slow rot you only notice when it breaks: vulnerable deps, unpinned actions, licence drift, flaky tests.	Read-only audits for dependency CVEs, dependency licences, LICENSE/NOTICE compliance, Actions workflow security, obsolete runner labels, and flaky-test patterns — plus a skill that fixes what they find.
`magpie-contributor-growth`	6	Contributors who have earned committership go unnoticed because nobody is tracking the signal.	Activity sweeps against a review threshold, readiness tracking, sentiment signals, nomination briefs for the PMC, and committer / post-vote onboarding checklists.
`magpie-utilities`	5	You want to write your own skills, or find out what is actually installed.	Skill authoring and restructuring, a state reconciler, a live index of installed skills, and a path to report framework bugs upstream. In the baseline.
`magpie-mentoring`	4	Newcomers open one PR, hit a wall of unwritten conventions, and never come back.	First-contact welcome comments, plain-language explanations of an issue for someone new, good-first-issue authoring, and a sweep that keeps that backlog honest.
`magpie-pairing`	2	You want the obvious problems found before a reviewer spends their time on them.	A structured self-review of your own diff, and a multi-agent adversarial review that verifies its findings before reporting them.