alt Hacker NewsSuperlite: A Faster Alternatie to Superpowers
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Superpowers has stopped working the past six months, to the point where it’s actively harmful. The main problem is the Writing Plans skill — its directives emphasize that the plan must be written for agents that cannot be trusted. What happens is the agent then writes all the code and the steps become “Copy this code block into foo.rs”. Meanwhile the review skill specifies that the code must follow the plan exactly; but now that it’s at the level of copying code, which hasn’t been tested and compiled*, the reviewer always freaks out about a stray & or comma, launching fixer agents and whatnot.
The last straw was two weeks ago when I discovered on a run Fable accounted for this problem in by first writing all the code in a scratch git repo and running unit tests, before copying that code into the plan. Since then I’ve been back to vibing. I lose overnight runs but gain sanity.
I've been using Compound Engineering by Every for a long time now. I like the brainstorm and plan features. Similarly I like the /grill-me skill by Matt Pocock. As a mediocre programmer, they help me get my ideas refined, documented and implemented.
I have found most of the other skills to emulate an 'enterprisy' way of developing, having everything checked multiple time by 'councils' and whatnot, making things slow, vacuum tokens like mad and the whole process reeks of cargo culting.
Like others I found superpowers helpful maybe 4 months ago. The models don't seem to need it anymore. I also don't have the same prompting issues the author has. Opus 5.5 tends to develop the spec, assumes I agree, and builds it. I make my sandwich and come back to a spec md, a diff, other evidence of completion. I use cc cli with a cmux-like platform it can control (ie open tabs showing specs, diffs itself).
When I hand off work to an agent it always, always, always gets the level of abstraction, important details or just missed context wrong. I'd rather have a lot of reviews than hand off work. Imho it's just not there yet if you care about what is actually generated.
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I don't think the model is needed anymore. I think given the new kind of things that are happening in the AI world, I've been using Gemini 3.8 Flash for a long time, I've been using Claude, Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 and literally find no reason at all to use SuperPars or SuperLight for that matter.
Looking at the comments here it's clear that there's a lack of understanding about what skills fundamentally are, they're process or procedure.
The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.
If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.
Markdown industrial complex.
Basic issue is this:
1. The models are probabilistic in their output. This is objectively verifiable fact. Give same prompt, repeat and you'll get different output.
2. With these markdown heavy approaches, the system has to keep a track of the system state not just in code but in tons of markdown files as well.
3. As the system evolves due to features, bug fixes, the corresponding markdown files are to be updated as well to keep in sync.
4. This update consumes tokens for sure so now token spend goes through roof.
5. But because the models are probabilistic, the real problem is that it is guaranteed that some of the places would not be updated or updated with misinformation in those markdown files.
6. Next agent run when loading the context from these markdown files would have misinformation in its context that it would discover mid task, would have to rectify the situation. token spend would be quadrupled.
7. Only those edge cases of markdown files would hit that has been visited so there would be many inconsistencies still and they would pile up and compound with the passage of time.
8. Anyone who has significant experience with such approaches would testify to that.
9. There's no solution to that other than just using agents as power tools and holding the context and desired outcome in your own head.
When I read misspelled words in a headline, I find myself flipping between - on nice, this is really created by a human. And, oh - this is just to make it seem like created by a human.
may be needed with lower tier or older models. my experience with the newer models are that these actively hurt their performance and burn tokens needlessly. You still need an agents.md specific to your project but not broad skills anymore. Because the software development best practices seem to have been baked into them at post training time.
I don’t understand the value of these things.
Why not just tell Claude to figure it out and build what it needs? Why do I need a plugin or a factory or whatever.
I just ask “can you go faster?” And claude suggests some stuff and mostly just works autonomously.
> I came back to a question that had been sitting there for twenty minutes, waiting for me to type "yes."
Even when starting Claude in dangerous mode, you still need to babysit it! Annoying.
superpowers was an important set of tools in q1 2026; no longer needed now
This looks cool but does it build as well as superpowers? One thing about using more than one implementation agent is agents may end up working on each others work. How does this prevent that?
The new release of Claude Project (beta) does this.
I thought superpowers was the coolest thing for about 1 day. Then the endless approval prompts and huge time increase killed it for me. I'm finding Opus 5.5 does a pretty thorough job without anything like superpowers. What would I be getting from superlite that Opus 5.5 doesn't do by itself already, and are those things actually important, or do they mostly only serve to give you peace of mind?
"Work the task to completion. Do not prompt for user approval before <minimum checkable unit of work> is done."
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Does the extra parallelism increase the token cost? By how much?
I've all but given up on these types of approaches. Models will often just ignore your process instructions at the most inopportune moments. For work, I've resorted to mostly just using single agents for smallish pieces of work that I orchestrate myself. I treat it as a tool, with me being the craftsman.
Everyone is pushing Agent Fleets and Swarms, and I'm sure that there are many success stories, but from our internal experiments many devs don't see any speed advantage for complex work. Here's what one of them told us recently: "The speed advantage is offset by the manual refactoring work. The code is 'correct', but it's just not what any of us would have written".
Now one could argue that you could just ignore the code if it's working (that is in fact what Ex Co instructed us to do) and just keep running these fleets if the end result "works", but I'm not fully convinced this will end well in the long term.
Then again, I'm stuck with decades of legacy code and systems that noone understands that were introduced by humans...