Superpowers 6
blog.fsck.com63 points by seahorseemoji 2 days ago
63 points by seahorseemoji 2 days ago
My use case is I have them installed and let Claude decide when to use them. Looks like for my recent sessions it has been using superpowers:test-driven-development 5%, and superpowers:subagent-driven... 1%. I haven't really been working on new projects this past week though which seems to be where they fire off the most, in particular the "writing a plan" one.
I gave Superpowers 5.x a whirl for a week, and aside from consuming a stupid amount of tokens, it did materially worse across all my personal benchmarks and general day-to-day development compared to plain Codex/Claude. I'm convinced it's either some 4D ploy by the AI cartels to set tokens ablaze, or it only provides Superpowers to those without any power to begin with. Rating: 1/5 Pinocchios. Would not recommend.
I'm a certified Superpowers hater. It's just not necessary with the modern models and fills up the context windows with garbage and adds an insane number of turns for no benefit.
I had similar prompts back when the models were terrible at instruction-following, so it was actually useful to fill up their context with a mass of instructions so they'd be less likely to forget rules.
Now I've got a few small slash commands or pasted prompts that work perfectly every time as the models follow them exactly.
I haven't used superpowers yet, but it seems a major focus of this release was to reduce clocktime as well as token spend.
From TFA (well, blog):
> The long and the short of it it is that across about 36 hours of work and what would have been $650 of unsubsidized token spend, our Anthropic eval benchmarks were looking like we'd reduced wall-clock runtime for Superpowers builds by 50% and token spend by 60%.
6.x feels much more efficient with respect to token usage to be fair.
I picked up superpowers back when it first started gaining traction; the first iteration felt like an “oh shit” moment for me, then the sheen quickly wore off. Higher spend, slower throughput and mediocre results made me eventually drop it and go back to plan mode, which had improved significantly during that time.
Coming back, 6.x does feel different and I’m back on the superpowers train. I’m finding it great at taking discrete tasks from beginning to end with very little hand holding.
I run every session with a /goal as well: “Spec + Plan is written and you have implemented the plan without my involvement. You have validated that the implementation is complete and ready to merge”
It’s also great in situations where you may need to complete a plan over multiple sessions, because you get a whole ton of state with superpowers that new sessions can pickup on.
This. I found superpowers a huge token guzzler. And more generic a skill is the worse it seemed to perform. I have found that skills are something you need to build yourself and for your needs and most importantly be willing to throw away. One team I know blindly checked this into every repo they had. They also had the highest cost per pr across all teams in our org (of about 60 eng teams). AI has already given people superpowers. How sad is it that they now need to be told how to just chat and prompt and use AI effectively as a pair programmer:(
I found it slowed me down significantly at first, and produced more verbose code. After a few weeks of using it, I think I've gotten used to it (sometimes I explicitly bypass it, but it's good enough to know which skill to use).
Yeah on the token consumption, I'll be doing something small at work, and it'll consume a lot of tokens.
Same here. I tried something similar to Superpowers and it went completely overboard for a small bug fix - writing a TDD, generating artifacts, etc.
For what it's worth, I really enjoy superpowers. In particular, it does a great job with TDD that stops the model from jumping to conclusions, and I've been able to get it, even with Opus, to execute on much longer specs quite well.
Superpowers feels like 20 years ago when people would be sharing and debating their incredibly elaborate .vimrc files, which totally made them super productive. Meanwhile, I tried to stick to stock configuration as much as possible (mostly for portability / ssh reasons). In a similar vein, these days some of my colleagues are sharing all their skills and prompt tricks and stuff, and I try to just use barebones Claude Code as much as possible, and I feel like it keeps getting better and better and all these prompt shenanigans are just not worth it.
Neither the article or the corporate blog post explains what Superpowers is. Seems to be an opinionated collection of skills for dev work
The GitHub description is a pretty good summary: "An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works."
Here's what that methodology looks like: https://github.com/obra/superpowers#the-basic-workflow
Where I $work, someone used Superpowers to pull off two big projects that before AI have always been left untouched because of the effort and time required. One was about unifying lots of duplicating (but kot exactly) libraries, and another to convert our bespoke shell scripts used throughout deployment pipeline to ansible.
When I used it though , I only found it burning too many tokens to do too little. I guess Superpowers is useful only in hands that know how to manipulate it.
How does Superpowers compare with Matt Pocock's skills[1]? I only tried the latter, and to be honest, I had positive results without burning a quadrillion tokens.
I heckin love his /grill-me skill. Terse, to the point, and delivers outsized results.
Gonna take a moment to share my own generic "retro" prompt, which has found many areas of improvement IME.
> Let's conclude with a retro. Did you run into any issues during this session that you think could be improved? Any failed tool calls, confusing docs/prompts, or tricky wording that took you effort to figure out, etc? Any final thoughts that you want to raise? Anything minor you didn't mention? Help make this codebase easier for the next agent to work in.
It's somewhat doc-focused since I'm currently working on fairly dense design docs... but you can easily customize it for your own needs.
This prompt reveals how absolutely _ass_ the Claude Code harness is (so many stupid tool call failures), but not much I can do about that.
> This prompt reveals how absolutely _ass_ the Claude Code harness is (so many stupid tool call failures)
I've just started using Claude Code this month after months of Claude in VSCode + GitHub Copilot (and a bit of dabbling with AWS Kiro), and I'm actually impressed by how seemingly polished Claude Code is.
I think Copilot in VSCode broke far more in my months of (ab)using it.
How do I know if this is worthwhile without any benchmarks against 'not using Superpowers'?
As a long time user, I'd recommend checking out https://github.com/obra/superpowers#the-basic-workflow. If that reasonates with you, try using it to develop a few features or capabilities.
It works very well for the way that I work (interactively and iteratively, not "one-shot"), and it helps me to better work in less time. Superpowers is one of the few skill/agent suites I use for all software development projects.
If you like building skill/agents, the posts at https://blog.fsck.com/ are a great resource for learning how to do well. The effectiveness of my project Axiom (a skill/agent suite for Apple OS developers) has benefited enormously from the knowledge that Superpowers' creator Jesse Vincent has been kind enough to share.
TLDR: You owe it to yourself to try it.
The cool thing about superpowers is it's built using evals rather than just vibes.
I've loved Superpowers right along. I think a lot of what it does has been ingested into Claude Code proper now so I'll be interested to see if this release actually changes things up.
All these prompt and skill based git repos are sus... nothing is benchmarked -its all so subjective and unproven and breaks with model updates -everyone and his uncle has a 'secret sauce skill' -that just proves to me the subjectivity of this endeavor.
This is great in concept but what prevents me from using it is TDD. I don't want to waste tokens on producing code that doesn't ship to the end user. Design by Contract is a far superior approach. If you've never heard of Design by Contract I don't blame you, our culture really failed to bring it mainstream. But I swear by it and it gives me real superpowers. Maybe I should fork this and gut the TDD part and replace it.
i just dont find skills work flow all that generic enough.
I'm honestly surprised at all the people here commenting that superpowers didn't work out for them.
For me personally, it was a game changer when I first began using it and now it simply is as much a part of my workflow as any say, using git (yeah it has its warts but way way more value).
Also, the latest (version 6) is noticebly token efficient as claimed.
Did the people who found it underwhelming not try starting with the brainstorming skill first?
I feel the same way. I've used superpowers since I found it during the initial Ralph hysteria and love it. Every task I do starts with brainstorming and it always produces great results, even coordinating across multiple repos. Having the plan to read and comment on ahead of time is great, although admittedly maybe that is built in to the major harnesses now and I just don't know about it. Always feel uneasy kicking off a task without having used superpowers.