I only use superpowers when I want to stick with composer2.5(fast) for everything. If I use it with other models it's terrible. With composer2.5 it is slightly better, though not much.

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%.

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:(

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.

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.

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

Not really - it's essentially a workflow.

The steps, described [here](https://github.com/obra/superpowers#the-basic-workflow), are: brainstorming → using-git-worktrees → writing-plans → subagent-driven-development or executing-plans → test-driven-development → requesting-code-review → finishing-a-development-branch.

The principles, described [here](https://github.com/obra/superpowers#philosophy), are: Write tests first, always; Process over guessing; 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.

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.

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.

apparently Matt has a upgraded version /grill-with-docs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BB6exR8Zd8

Nothing about Superpowers forces you to use TDD, brainstorm first, etc. It’s not rigid about the workflow.

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.

Ehe ... https://github.com/prime-radiant-inc/superpowers-evals

This is about that.