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

blog.fsck.com

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

#211

Post by gdown »

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…

Especially with some of the more generic skills like https://github.com/obra/superpowers-skills/blob/main/skills/... and https://github.com/obra/superpowers-skills/blob/main/skills/...: it seems like they're general enough that they'd be better off in the main prompt. I'd be interested to see when claude actually decides to pull them in

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

#212

Post by jvanderbot »

aydyn wrote: post #189
jvanderbot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is we're still in the tinkering phase. The metrics are coming.

What metrics? We could never objectively measure productivity except in the macro economic sense, so what makes you think we'll be able to now?

There are best practices of a kind, and well known org structures that work for building software, at least as much as anything can. We'll have some best practice experience with LLM agents soon enough.

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

#213

Post by simonw »

redhale wrote: post #207
smrtinsert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you think of sub agents, don't they still consume a massive amount of tokens compared to simply running in main context? I'm skeptical of any process that starts massively delegating to sub agents. I'm on Pro and don't think its worth upgrading to 200 a month just to not pollute main context.

In my opinion, subagents (or more generally, "agents as tools" as a pattern) are an order-of-magnitude level feature. Soon every CLI agent will have them as a first-class feature (you can get them via custom scripting right now with and CLI agent, albeit less ergonomically). The ability to isolate context-noisy subtasks (like agentically searching through a large codebase by grepping through dozens of irrelevant file…

This is a great answer IMO.

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

#214

Post by subjectivationx »

nightski wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Obviously if you instruct the autocomplete engine to fill in questions it will. That's not the point. The LLM has no model of the problem it is trying to solve, nor does it attempt to understand the problem better. It is merely regurgitating. This can be extremely useful. But it is very limiting when it comes to using as an agent to write code.

I think at some point we will stop pretending we have real AI. We have a breakthrough in natural language processing but LLMs are much closer to Microsoft Word than something as fantastical as "AGI". We don't blame Microsoft Word for not having a model of what is being typed in. It would be great if Microsoft Word could model the world and just do all the work for us but it is a science fiction fantasy. To me, LLMs in practice are largely massively compute inefficient search engines plus really good language disambiguation. Useful, but we have actually made no progress at all towards "real" AI. This is especially obvious if you ditch "AI" and call it artificial understanding. We have nothing.

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

#215

Post by simonw »

smrtinsert wrote: post #190
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/

Curious what you think of sub agents, don't they still consume a massive amount of tokens compared to simply running in main context? I'm skeptical of any process that starts massively delegating to sub agents. I'm on Pro and don't think its worth upgrading to 200 a month just to not pollute main context.

I think they're worthwhile only as a token context management tool - to complete side quests without using up tokens in your main agent loop.

Using them in a way that doesn't waste tokens is something I haven't fully figured out out yet!

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

#216

Post by iamjfu »

I am interested by this link: https://blog.fsck.com/blog/2025/superpowers/superpowers-demo...

``` Claude Code v2.0.13 Sonnet 4.5 (with 1M token context) Claude Max /Users/jesse/tmp/new-tool/.worktrees/todo-cli ```

How does this person have access to Sonnet 4.5 with 1m token context? I don't see this referenced anywhere when I search or when I ask Claude about it.

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

#217

Post by simonw »

redhale wrote: post #200
simonw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK government ran a study with thousands of developers quite recently: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-coding-assista...

I don't necessarily think the conclusions are wrong, but this relies entirely on self-reported survey results to measure productivity gains. That's too easy to poke holes in, and I think studies like this are unlikely to convince real skeptics in the near term.

At this point it's becoming clear from threads similar to this one that quite a lot of the skeptics are actively working not to be convinced by anything.

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

#218

Post by redhale »

simonw wrote: post #217
redhale wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily think the conclusions are wrong, but this relies entirely on self-reported survey results to measure productivity gains. That's too easy to poke holes in, and I think studies like this are unlikely to convince real skeptics in the near term.

At this point it's becoming clear from threads similar to this one that quite a lot of the skeptics are actively working not to be convinced by anything.

Do you have a study to back that up? /s

I agree. I think there are too many resources, examples, and live streams out there for someone to credibly claim at this point that these tools have no value and are all hype. I think the nuance is in how and where you apply it, what your expectations and tolerances are, and what your working style is. They are bad at many things, but there is tremendous value to be discovered. The loudest people on both sides of this debate are typically wrong in similar ways imo.

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

#219

Post by lazarus01 »

benrutter wrote: post #179

I'm so curious around what people's median experience is of AI coding tools. I've tried agents every now and then, recently for something very simple- add an option to request csb format in a data api. The results were, well, not good. . . I ended up undoing literally all changes because writing from scratch was a lot easier than trying to refactor the total mess it has made from what I'd have thought was a trivial f…

AI coding works amazingly well

But only on micro tasks, coming with explicit instructions, inside a very well documented architecture.

Give AI freedom of expression and they will never find first principals in their training data. You will receive code that is not performant and when analyzing the output, AI will try to convince you that it is. If the task goes beyond your domain, you may believe the wrong principals are ok.

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

#220

Post by diamond559 »

danshapiro wrote: post #194
bcoates wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the persuasion paper he links isn't at all about what he's talking about. That paper is about using persuasion prompts to overcome trained in "safety" refusals, not to improve prompt conformance.

Co-Author of the paper here. We don't know exactly why modern llms don't want to call you a jerk, or for that matter why persuasive techniques convince them otherwise. it's not a hard line like many of the guardrails. That said, I talked to Jesse about this, and I strongly suspect the same techniques will work for prompt conformance when the topic is something other than name calling.

It's bc they are programmed to be agreeable and friendly so that you'll keep using them.
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