obra/superpowers

Yea, we like obra/superpowers a lot. For folks who are unaware, see: https://github.com/obra/superpowers the original version of our high autonomy skillset was a fork of obra's superpowers back in...October? November? of last year. Whenever it first came out. I think basically all of the best skillsets implement SPACE, including superpowers, mattpocock skills, get shit done, etc. There are aesthetic reasons why you might prefer one over the other, but candidly I think any of them will get the job done and are strictly better than not using one of the SPACE skillsets. (I haven't played with the latest version of superpowers. My hunch is that on average our skillsets have better compliance …

I like using grill me in conjunction with obra superpowers spec driven development https://www.aihero.dev/skills-grill-me https://github.com/obra/superpowers When I'm doing something quite complex I'll also throw in gstack office hours but I find that its usually overkill for many things https://github.com/garrytan/gstack I do often use the /qa skill regardless though. I always hated QA because it was so monotonous and it required a level of organization and creativity i never had (i mean im the developer so if I thought of edge cases id have solved for them) I like that /qa covers and documents every edge case that it tested and I can nudge it about other ones

The cool kids have custom harnesses and workflows and stuff, yeah. I'm still using Superpowers in Codex. Planning in Sol, Luna subagents. https://github.com/obra/superpowers I feel like I could be doing a lot better somehow. Regardless though Luna (xhigh specifically) is super good/cheap/fast for a lot of things what about you

https://github.com/obra/superpowers I use Opus/Sol with for /brainstorming, deepseek (on Pi) for /subagent-driven-development I love it, the docs are easily editable and when I'm ready Deepseek is faster/cheaper then everything on my coding plans.

…d disregards all the other ways we send email and writes its own thing. And often I'll go "Where's the button to do X" and it will say "You're right! Nobody asked for it, so this page is an orphan!" I happen to use Superpower's ( https://github.com/obra/superpowers ) "brainstorm -> spec -> plan" workflow in e.g. Fable MAX (for anything non-trivial) then I have Fable send to GPT 5.6 Sol XHIGH for execution, with Fable (either the original, or a separate one, depending on the criticality of the task and the blast radius) being the critical reviewer. Even then, though, I need to continually guide it against the norms and conventions of the codebase/app, because it makes a ton of assumptions. …

Superpowers' brainstorming skill is another classic example of this. It's been incredibly effective for me. https://github.com/obra/superpowers/blob/main/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md

…essing; Simplicity as primary goal; Verify before declaring success. Install it, take a complex tasks, and instruct the agent to implement it; it's easier to watch it in action than to describe it. In my own experience, the advantage is that it's a very systematic workflow - investigation of requirements, breakdown in simpler steps, and TDD development, among the other aspects.

In my experience harness can do wonders to improve this. Instead of asking it to generically to analyze and do X, you can use brainstorming skills like those from superpowers [1]. This makes it approach the problem better and keeps you in the loop. Another step is then to have it review its plans by another LLM acting doing adversarial review. I have a claude skill [2] that calls codex to do it, and they chat among each other. It's a tremendous boost in design quality. [1] https://github.com/obra/Superpowers [2] https://gist.github.com/enricopolanski/6c5038a8e20cc4098cd99f44f7012925

I've been using superpowers [1] for this purpose, and have really appreciated how it guides the model to use careful, methodical approaches to answering my prompts. It's great for multi-step planning, design, and implementation, but also has guidance for debugging, accepting a code review, etc. [1] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

… the result. If you do want to lean more heavily into agents doing most of the work, try to make sure they are following proper development practices. Something they don't actually do by default but using something like the superpowers skills makes a world of difference: https://github.com/obra/superpowers Having them follow TDD helps a lot. I've even considered adding a QA agent/skill in here expanding things further to not just unit tests and some basic manual tests but also creating proper automated tests (following the test automation pyramid principles) to create an entire test suite. Not to actually give more control to LLMs, but because it allows me to more easily spot where things…

So old school, now we get install lines like Tell Opencode to "Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/superpowers/refs/heads/main/.opencode/INSTALL.md " From a real repo, with 186K stars... https://github.com/obra/superpowers

The even more concerning news to me is that chardet 7.0 is now vibe coded AI slop, as documented in the PR for the rewrite [1]: > I put this together using Claude Code with Opus 4.6 with the amazing https://github.com/obra/superpowers plugin in less than a week. It took a fair amount of iteration to get it dialed in quite like I wanted, but it took a project I had been putting off for many years and made it take ~4 days. Given the amount of changes I seriously doubt that this re-implementation has been reviewed properly and I wonder how this is going to be maintainable going forward. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

documents like https://github.com/obra/superpowers/blob/main/skills/testing/test-driven-development/SKILL.md are very confusing to read as a human. "skills" in this project generally don't seem to follow set format and just look like what you would get when prompting an LLM to "write a markdown doc that step by step describes how to do X" (which is what actually happened according to the blog post). idk, but if you already assume that the LLM knows what TDD is (it probably ingested ~100 whole books about it), why are we feeding a short (and imo confusing) version of that back to it before the actual prompt? i feel like a lot of projects like this that are supposed to give LLMs "superpowers…