21–30 of 242 posts
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 often feel these types of blogposts would be more helpful if they demonstrated someone using the tools to build something non-trivial. Is Claude really "learning new skills" when you feed it a book, or does it present it like that because you're prompting encourages that sort of response-behavior. I feel like it has to demo Claude with the new skills and Claude without. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but most of these type…
Agreed. The methodology needed here is something like an A/B test, with quantifiable metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool. And to do it not just once, but many times under different scenarios so that it demonstrates statistical significance. The most challenging part when working with coding agents is that they seem to do well initially on a small code base with low complexity. Once the codebase get…
I made a crude first stab at an approach that at least uses similar steps and structure to compare the effectiveness of AI agents. My approach was used on a small toy problem, but one that was complex enough the agents couldn't one-shot and required error correction.
It was enough to show significant differences, but scaling this to larger projects and multiple runs would be pretty difficult.
https://mattwigdahl.substack.com/p/claude-code-vs-codex-cli-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.
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…
I often feel these types of blogposts would be more helpful if they demonstrated someone using the tools to build something non-trivial. Is Claude really "learning new skills" when you feed it a book, or does it present it like that because you're prompting encourages that sort of response-behavior. I feel like it has to demo Claude with the new skills and Claude without. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but most of these type…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We certainly will; they can’t replace humans in most language tasks without having a human like emotional model. I have a whole therapy set of agents to debug neurotic long lived agents with memory.
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…
Not only do I have know everything about the code, data and domain, but now I need to understand this whole AI system which is a meta skill of its own.
I fear I may never be able catch up till someone comes along and simplifies it for pleb consumption.
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/
The packaged collection is very cool and so is the idea of automatically adding new abilities, but I’m not fully convinced that this concept of skills is that much better than having custom commands+sub-agents. I’ll have to play around with it these next few days and compare.
Maybe this is a naive question, but how are "skills" different from just adding a bunch od examples of good/bad behavior into the prompt? As far as I can tell, each skill file is a bunch of good/bad examples of something. Is the difference that the model chooses when to load a certain skill into context?