Superpowers 6

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.

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.

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.

Neither the article or the corporate blog post explains what Superpowers is. Seems to be an opinionated collection of skills for dev work

https://github.com/obra/superpowers

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QFHIoCo-Ko

How do I know if this is worthwhile without any benchmarks against 'not using Superpowers'?

Anyone have an opinion comparing this to GSD?

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.

The cool thing about superpowers is it's built using evals rather than just vibes.

To be blunt I can't take this product seriously when they don't even run benchmarks. Your prompts make Claude better? Cool: prove it. Methods to evaluate LLM performance exist, they're called evals/benchmarks, and every company that is serious about AI runs them when they release a new version. (Of course benchmarks have their own issues, but squabbling over which benchmark is best and what issues there are is step 2 in being a Serious AI Company and step 1 is running them at all!) The fact that the only proof they have that 6 is better than five is a hacky table in a screenshot from Fable is, honestly, concerning.

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.

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?

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.

I thought this would be about https://github.com/obra/superpowers