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Superpowers 6

blog.fsck.com

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Re: Superpowers 6

#31

Post by CharlesW »

mempko wrote: post #27

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…

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

Re: Superpowers 6

#32

Post by pizza234 »

dmix wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Superpowers 6

#33

Post by jorl17 »

artisin wrote: post #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.

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.

Re: Superpowers 6

#34

Post by Tenoke »

arcticfox wrote: post #23
artisin wrote: post #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.

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 comman…

Yeah I like the idea, but I'd rather just not use most of these plugins, superpowers included. Code seems to include the best tricks in itself anyway at a fast pace.

Re: Superpowers 6

#35

Post by arikrahman »

arcticfox wrote: post #23
artisin wrote: post #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.

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 comman…

Likewise. I use Reasonix with planning-with-files and that's been better than even openspec. Cache hits with the help of Reasonix on Deepseek make requests practically free. And that's unsubsidized, with American providers like Digital Ocean or cloudflare.

Re: Superpowers 6

#36

Post by mgambati »

losvedir wrote: post #24

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…

Ultracode is pretty good. I’m not basically using the grill-with-docs from Matt and default plan mode on Cc or codex. It’s just enough.

Re: Superpowers 6

#37

Post by johnfn »

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.

Re: Superpowers 6

#39

Post by [deleted] »

mempko wrote: post #27

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…

[deleted]

Re: Superpowers 6

#40

Post by simonw »

mempko wrote: post #27

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…

What programming language are you using for Design by Contract?
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