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.

And the fact that this article’s story is basically “I prompted Fable with a goal and went to sleep and the model got it done” is telling me that the latest models have gotten past the need for Superpowers… even the creators of superpowers is just using a simple /goal!

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 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%.

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.

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.

Same here. I tried something similar to Superpowers and it went completely overboard for a small bug fix - writing a TDD, generating artifacts, etc.