Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • When I read misspelled words in a headline, I find myself flipping between - on nice, this is really created by a human. And, oh - this is just to make it seem like created by a human.
  • > I came back to a question that had been sitting there for twenty minutes, waiting for me to type "yes."

    Even when starting Claude in dangerous mode, you still need to babysit it! Annoying.

  • may be needed with lower tier or older models. my experience with the newer models are that these actively hurt their performance and burn tokens needlessly. You still need an agents.md specific to your project but not broad skills anymore. Because the software development best practices seem to have been baked into them at post training time.
  • Looking at the comments here it's clear that there's a lack of understanding about what skills fundamentally are, they're process or procedure.

    The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.

    If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.

    by ra
  • I don't think the model is needed anymore. I think given the new kind of things that are happening in the AI world, I've been using Gemini 3.8 Flash for a long time, I've been using Claude, Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 and literally find no reason at all to use SuperPars or SuperLight for that matter.
  • Like others I found superpowers helpful maybe 4 months ago. The models don't seem to need it anymore. I also don't have the same prompting issues the author has. Opus 5.5 tends to develop the spec, assumes I agree, and builds it. I make my sandwich and come back to a spec md, a diff, other evidence of completion. I use cc cli with a cmux-like platform it can control (ie open tabs showing specs, diffs itself).
  • I've been using Compound Engineering by Every for a long time now. I like the brainstorm and plan features. Similarly I like the /grill-me skill by Matt Pocock. As a mediocre programmer, they help me get my ideas refined, documented and implemented.

    I have found most of the other skills to emulate an 'enterprisy' way of developing, having everything checked multiple time by 'councils' and whatnot, making things slow, vacuum tokens like mad and the whole process reeks of cargo culting.

  • I've all but given up on these types of approaches. Models will often just ignore your process instructions at the most inopportune moments. For work, I've resorted to mostly just using single agents for smallish pieces of work that I orchestrate myself. I treat it as a tool, with me being the craftsman.

    Everyone is pushing Agent Fleets and Swarms, and I'm sure that there are many success stories, but from our internal experiments many devs don't see any speed advantage for complex work. Here's what one of them told us recently: "The speed advantage is offset by the manual refactoring work. The code is 'correct', but it's just not what any of us would have written".

    Now one could argue that you could just ignore the code if it's working (that is in fact what Ex Co instructed us to do) and just keep running these fleets if the end result "works", but I'm not fully convinced this will end well in the long term.

    Then again, I'm stuck with decades of legacy code and systems that noone understands that were introduced by humans...

Explore Birbla archives