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Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

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Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#131

Post by specproc »

sawmurai wrote: post #98
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my current opinion on this is that AI tools make development harder work . You can get big productivity boosts out of them but you have to be working at the top of your game - I often find I'm mentally exhausted after just a couple of hours.

I have a similar experience. It feels like riding your bike in a higher gear - you can go faster but it will take more effort and you need the potential (stronger legs) to make use of it

It's more like shifting from a normal to an electric bike.

You can go further and faster, but you can get to a point where you're out of juice miles from home, and getting back is a chuffing nightmare.

Also, you discover that you're putting on weight and not getting that same buzz you got on your old pushbike.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#132

Post by Footprint0521 »

hoechst wrote: post #62

documents like https://github.com/obra/superpowers/blob/main/skills/testing... are very confusing to read as a human. "skills" in this project generally don't seem to follow set format and just look like what you would get when prompting an LLM to "write a markdown doc that step by step describes how to do X" (which is what actually happened according to the blog post). idk, but if you already assume that the LLM kno…

I fully agree. I’ve been running codex with GPT Pro (5o-codex-high) for a few weeks now, and it really just boils down to context.

I’ve found the most helpful things for me is just voice to Whisper to LLMs, managing token usage effectively and restarting chats when necessary, and giving it quantified ways to check when its work is done (say, AI-Unit-Tests with apis or playwright tests.) Also, every file I own is markdown haha.

And obviously having different AI chats for specialized tasks (the way the math works on these models makes this have much better results!)

All of this has allowed me to still be in the PM role like he said, but without burning down a needless forest on having it reevaluate things in its training set lol. But why would we go back to vendor lock in with Claude? Not to mention how much more powerful 5o-codex-high is, it’s not even close

The good thing about what he said is getting AI to work with AI, I have found this to be incredibly useful in promoting, and segmenting out roles

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#133

Post by preommr »

> It made sense to me that the persuasion principles I learned in Robert Cialdini's Influence would work when applied to LLMs. And I was pleased that they did.

No, no. Stop.

What is this? What're we doing here?

This goes past developping with AI into something completely different.

Just because AI coding is a radical shift doesn't mean everything has changed. There needs to be some semblance of structure and design. Instead what we're getting is straight up vodoo nonsense.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#134

Post by mceachen »

danielbln wrote: post #126
kasey_junk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s irritating is that the llms haven’t learned this as bout themselves yet. If you ask an llm to improve its instructions those sort of improvements are what it will suggest. It is the thing I find most irritating about working with llms and agents. They seem forever a generation behind in capabilities that are self referential.

LLMs will also happily put time estimates on work packages that are based on ore-LLM turn around times. "Phase 2 will take about one week" No, Claude, it won't, because you you and I will bang this thing out in a few hours.

"Refrain from including estimated task completion times." has been in my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for a while. It helps.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#135

Post by sunir »

ambicapter wrote: post #25
jvanderbot wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, call me crazy, but I don't actually think there's any technical reason that a theoretical code generation robot needs emotions that are as fickle and difficult to manage as humans. It's just that we designed this iteration of technology foundationally on people's fickle and emotional reddit posts among other things. It's a designed-in limitation, and kind of a happy accident it's capable of writing code at all. A…

If you can find enough training data that does human-like things without have human-like qualities, we are all ears.

Quality Spock pun.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#136

Post by danielbln »

simonw wrote: post #74
kannanvijayan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered about exposing this "asking clarifying questions" as a tool the AI could use. I'm not building AI tooling so I haven't done this - but what if you added an MCP endpoint whose description was "treat this endpoint as an oracle that will answer questions and clarify intent where necessary" (paraphrased), and have that tool just wire back to a user prompt. If asking clarifying questions is plausible output…

I think the asking clarifying questions thing is solved already. Tell a coding agent to "ask clarifying questions" and watch what it does!

I've added "amcq means ask me clarifying questions" to my global Claude.md so I can spam "amcq" at various points in time, to great avail.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#137

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

j_bum wrote: post #120
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind linking to example spec/to-do files?

Sure thing. Here is an example set of the agent/spec/to-do files for a hobby project I'm actively working on. https://gist.github.com/JacobBumgarner/d29b660cb81a227885acc...

Thanks!

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#138

Post by imiric »

preommr wrote: post #133

> It made sense to me that the persuasion principles I learned in Robert Cialdini's Influence would work when applied to LLMs. And I was pleased that they did. No, no. Stop. What is this? What're we doing here? This goes past developping with AI into something completely different. Just because AI coding is a radical shift doesn't mean everything has changed. There needs to be some semblance of structure and design.…

> Instead what we're getting is straight up vodoo nonsense.

It always has been. Starting with the term "AI" itself.

Articles like these read the same way to me as any OpenAI announcement from the past 5 years. A bunch of technical mumbo jumbo laced with hyperbole, grand promises of how the technology is changing the world, and similar platitudes. I've learned to filter most of it out.

Occasionally I'll stumble upon an actually useful and practical tidbit of information which I can apply in my own workflow, which does involve LLMs, but most of the time it's just noise.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#139

Post by fnicfnac »

dbbk wrote: post #20
tobbe2064 wrote: post #12

What's the cost of running with agents like this?

Claude Max is fixed cost

"20X the usage of pro" still sounds like quotas where the hammer could fall as it becomes less of an experiment for a limited number of power users..

The costs of self hosting some reasonable size models for a development group of various sizes is what I would want to know before investing in the skills to do a high usage style that might be being mostly bankrolled by investors for now.

Re: Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

#140

Post by ehsanu1 »

csar wrote: post #27
simonw wrote: post #21

I can't recommend this post strongly enough. The way Jesse is using these tools is wildly more ambitious than most other people. Spend some time digging around in his https://github.com/obra/Superpowers repo. I wrote some notes on this last night: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/superpowers/

I’m curious how you think this compares to the Research -> Plan -> Implement method and prompts from the “Advanced Context Engineering from Agents” video when it comes to actual coding performance on large codebases. I think picking up skills is useful for broadening agents abilities, but I’m not sure I’d that’s the right thing for actual development. The packaged collection is very cool and so is the idea of automat…

Using Research->Plan->Implement flow is orthogonal, though I notice parts of those do exist as skills too. But you sometimes need to do other things too, e.g. debugging in the course of implementing or specific techniquws to improve brainstorming/researching.

Some of these skills are probably better as programmed workflows that the LLM is forced to go through to improve reliability/consistency, that's what I've found in my own agents, rather than using English to guide the LLM and trusting it to follow the prescribed set of steps needed. Some mix of LLMs (choosing skills, executing the fuzzy parts of them) and just plain code (orchestration of skills) seems like the best bet to me and what I'm pursuing.

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