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A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

emschwartz.me

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Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#11

Post by MachineBurning »

deaux wrote: post #3

> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature. It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible.…

There's also:

4. Tell claude what to do instead, which will update the plan base on what you say.

5. Add comments to the plan directly - similar to 4 - but you can comment on specific parts.

Note: I use the VSCode extension, not sure if it differs in terminal mode.

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#12

Post by CPLX »

deaux wrote: post #3

> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature. It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible.…

You can just tell it what to do. I have a cut and paste handy that lets the tool know to present all judgement calls to me a few at a time in logical groups to give feedback on. I go through that process and then it pulls the plan from that

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#13

Post by no_shadowban_6 »

d--b wrote: post #9

I personally don't like superpowers very much. My boss does. I think Claude makes more mistakes when using superpowers than when not. but maybe it's my fault. I recommend trying. it doesn't hurt. Just don't believe it's a silver bullet. It's still the same Claude. The way I use Claude is quite similar to what super powers does under the hood anyways. Like I always ask things like this: "if I want to do X, what questi…

[dead]

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#14

Post by deaux »

MachineBurning wrote: post #11
deaux wrote: post #3

> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature. It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible.…

There's also: 4. Tell claude what to do instead, which will update the plan base on what you say. 5. Add comments to the plan directly - similar to 4 - but you can comment on specific parts. Note: I use the VSCode extension, not sure if it differs in terminal mode.

Maybe they've updated it in the last couple weeks and my comment is out of date - I hope so! Because the 5th option definitely wasn't there when I recently used it, and the 4th you're mentioning looks familiar but I'm pretty sure in that case to it didn't (used to?) write it to a file.

Will try it again.

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#15

Post by Lerc »

deaux wrote: post #3

> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature. It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible.…

>It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible

It's difficult to know what the appropriate process for a model would be without widespread deployment. I can see how they have to strike a fine balance between keeping up with what the feedback shows would be best and changing the way the user interacts with the system. Often it's easy to tell what would be better once something is deployed, but if people are productively using the currently deployed system you always have to weigh the advantage of a new method against the cost of people having to adapt. It is rare to make something universally better, and making things worse for users is bad.

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#16

Post by Syzygies »

d--b wrote: post #9

I personally don't like superpowers very much. My boss does. I think Claude makes more mistakes when using superpowers than when not. but maybe it's my fault. I recommend trying. it doesn't hurt. Just don't believe it's a silver bullet. It's still the same Claude. The way I use Claude is quite similar to what super powers does under the hood anyways. Like I always ask things like this: "if I want to do X, what questi…

>The way I use Claude is quite similar to what super powers does under the hood anyways.

I bake my own bread and solo code, both episodic. No matter how I vary fresh starts, I always end up in the same place. The optimization problem feels to be a giant bowl.

This reminds me of named flavors of management style for teams of programmers. A friend in this role instead prefers deep dives into Apollo flight control, and abstracting.

As a solo programmer I always converge on staying extraordinarily involved in planning and code review, and working in steps of finer granularity than superpowers suggests. One may produce less code this way, but it's the only way I know to discover one needs less code.

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#18

Post by keheliya »

deaux wrote: post #3

> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature. It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible.…

I've found [Plannotator]( https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator) useful for this. It opens the plan on a minimal web page so I can highlight and add comments. This is then passed back to Claude code. Works well enough for now. But ideally this should be natively implemented in cc.

Re: A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

#19

Post by emschwartz »

tao_oat wrote: post #8
JohnCClarke wrote: post #4

Online reviews indicate that Superpowers is best for people who are not already experienced SW development managers. Is that true? What is your experience of it? For me, I am a solid KISS believer, so I have not yet found a better framework than just plain old Claude Code. But happy to move to a better workflow, if it's real.

Overall I think it's useful. Superpowers has several skills. Its core workflow is: - Brainstorm with you to design a spec - Use subagents to review its own spec, then get your approval - Based on the spec, write a plan, use subagents to review before final approval - Use subagents to implement (using TDD) I think that the brainstorming skill [1] is great. It helps flesh out a rough early idea. I also like that it use…

Yeah I agree with the implementation plan not being that useful for me to read. I often just tell it to go after reading the design doc.
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