Discussion summary
Discussions about Superpowers 6 highlight concerns over lack of benchmarking and subjective evaluation methods. Some users compare it to other tools like obra's Superpowers and GSD, with mixed opinions on its effectiveness.
What the discussion says
- Critics argue the product lacks proper benchmarks and relies on subjective assessments.
- Some users suggest it may perform better with open-source models rather than proprietary ones.
- Others believe the concept of convincing LLMs to improve is often ineffective.
“I can't take this product seriously when they don't run benchmarks.”
“This is about that, I believe.”
Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I'm honestly surprised at all the people here commenting that superpowers didn't work out for them.
For me personally, it was a game changer when I first began using it and now it simply is as much a part of my workflow as any say, using git (yeah it has its warts but way way more value).
Also, the latest (version 6) is noticebly token efficient as claimed.
Did the people who found it underwhelming not try starting with the brainstorming skill first?
by devnonymous - I used Superpowers for a few weeks. I ran into a couple issues:
* I wish I could turn it on selectively. Many of my requests do not require the "verification before completion" and TDD ceremony. For example, agents using stock Superpowers will go so far as to grep a file every time you ask to add something to them to verify that the edit really landed.
* While I like speccing out/designing a project before implementation (nothing new in that regard), I don't like how precisely superpowers plans out the implementation in the /writing-plans skill. It tells future agents exactly what files to edit. There are two big issues with this:
IMO, the strongest part of Superpowers is /subagent-driven-development. Yes, it's SUPER slow. For a laugh, you can ask it to make a change you know can be done in one line. It'll do it in one line, but it take literally an hour with all the verification. But that's sort of the point. It is _very_ deliberate. For each step, it reviews the step for both compliance and code quality, then has another agent implement the fixes, _and then it reviews the fixes again_. It does this for every step (not at the end of the project). While this might seem like overkill, it leads to code which complies with the spec far better.* We need to manage context rot. If one LLM session is responsible for writing out the entire plan, we aren't solving context rot. Not only is the "smart window" of context exhausted by the time the agent is planning, eg, step 7 out of 15, but it's also dragging forward all the possibly bad ideas it had earlier. It would be better if steps were planned independently. * Implementation is an iterative process. You find things out as you go. Your assumptions turned out to be wrong, you realize APIs don't behave the way you thought you did, etc. This is why writing out a precise plan ahead of time is an issue – it's written without this iteration.Instead of writing a super detailed spec, I think I'd like /writing-plans to come up with appropriate "units" of work (sometimes called slices) and to brainstorm with the user regarding implementation, but to leave it looser than "edit this exact file in this exact way". That should leave a lot more leeway to implementation agents but still give the review agents something to check compliance against.
by tmach32 - The screenshot of ol' claude closed code with that ascii table tells it all: Vapor AIware.
As if it really would work like that. The noise added by the verbosity alone is not taken care of enough, and this entire thing belongs on the great pile of ai vaporware.
by Amekedl - How does Superpowers compare with Matt Pocock's skills[1]? I only tried the latter, and to be honest, I had positive results without burning a quadrillion tokens.by overflowy
- Where I $work, someone used Superpowers to pull off two big projects that before AI have always been left untouched because of the effort and time required. One was about unifying lots of duplicating (but kot exactly) libraries, and another to convert our bespoke shell scripts used throughout deployment pipeline to ansible.
When I used it though , I only found it burning too many tokens to do too little. I guess Superpowers is useful only in hands that know how to manipulate it.
by smusamashah - Neither the article or the corporate blog post explains what Superpowers is. Seems to be an opinionated collection of skills for dev workby dmix
- For what it's worth, I really enjoy superpowers. In particular, it does a great job with TDD that stops the model from jumping to conclusions, and I've been able to get it, even with Opus, to execute on much longer specs quite well.by prplfsh
- 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 Code as much as possible, and I feel like it keeps getting better and better and all these prompt shenanigans are just not worth it.by losvedir