REPO PACKAGE

obra superpowers

COMMUNITY

obra · publisher247,050 repository starsMIT · Freegithub.com/obra/superpowers

14skills

4groups

11ready to use

LABSCO SUMMARY

The 14 chain into one pipeline: brainstorming turns a rough idea into a written design, writing-plans breaks the design into small tasks, using-git-worktrees isolates the work on its own branch, and then subagent-driven-development or executing-plans runs the tasks under red-green test-driven-development with a two-stage review (requesting-code-review, receiving-code-review) before finishing-a-development-branch decides whether to merge. Two skills sit outside that chain: writing-skills, for authoring new skills in this same format, and dispatching-parallel-agents, for running independent tasks concurrently. Nine of the 14 need nothing beyond the agent itself; the other five assume a local tool already on the machine, git chief among them for the worktree skill.

This suits someone who wants their agent to default to a disciplined, plan-then-test-then-review process and is willing to let it run unattended for a couple of hours against a plan they signed off on first. It does not suit someone who wants to borrow one skill, like test-driven-development, on its own: using-superpowers is written to load automatically and to require a skill check before the agent answers anything, including a clarifying question.

READ THE FULL ANALYSIS

Ten install paths, one skill set. The README gives separate install steps for Claude Code (two competing marketplaces), Antigravity, Codex App, Codex CLI, Cursor, Factory Droid, GitHub Copilot CLI, Kimi Code, OpenCode, and Pi, and says plainly that using more than one of these means installing Superpowers again in each — there is no single install that covers every agent.

One skill phones home by default. The brainstorming skill's optional visual companion loads a logo from the maintainer's own site and reports which Superpowers version is running. The maintainers say it carries no project, prompt, or click data; it is turned off by setting the SUPERPOWERS_DISABLE_TELEMETRY environment variable, or by either of Claude Code's own telemetry opt-outs.

Who wrote it, and who can change it. Superpowers is maintained by Jesse Vincent and Prime Radiant, not Anthropic, and the README says the project does not generally accept new skills as contributions — only fixes to the existing 14, tested across every agent it supports.

14Grouped into 4 sets by the authors.

11Work with nothing else to set up.

247,050Stars on the GitHub repository, at last check.

ALSO IN THIS PACKAGE

WHAT'S INSIDE

14 showing · 14 total

Ready to use

Nothing else to set up — install it and go.

Showing all 14 skills

Before any code2 skills

brainstorming

A rule against jumping straight into code — the assistant has to talk the idea through with you and get a clear yes on what it intends to build, however small the job looks.

Before any codeNO EXTRA SETUP

writing-plans

Turns an agreed design into a written, step-by-step plan detailed enough that someone who has never seen the project could follow it without asking questions.

Before any codeNO EXTRA SETUP

Before calling it done4 skills

finishing-a-development-branch

The last step of a piece of work: run the whole test suite, and only once it is green, offer you the choice of folding the work into the main code, opening it up for review, or leaving it where it is.

Before calling it doneLOCAL FILES

receiving-code-review

Someone criticises the code and the easy reply is "you're absolutely right". This forbids that: the suggestion gets checked against the real codebase first, and argued with when it is wrong.

Before calling it doneNO EXTRA SETUP

requesting-code-review

Hands the finished code to a second, separate assistant to go over with fresh eyes, and brings back what it found sorted into must-fix, should-fix and minor.

Before calling it doneLOCAL FILES

verification-before-completion

Nothing gets called done until it has been shown to work: the command is run, the output is read, and only then does the claim get made.

Before calling it doneNO EXTRA SETUP

The set itself2 skills

using-superpowers

Before answering anything at all — even a clarifying question — the assistant is made to check whether one of these skills covers the situation, and to follow it when one does.

The set itselfNO EXTRA SETUP

writing-skills

How to write one of these skill documents so that it actually changes what an assistant does: watch it get the job wrong first, write the instruction, then put it through the same job again.

The set itselfNO EXTRA SETUP

While the work runs6 skills

dispatching-parallel-agents

When several unrelated things are broken at once, this hands each one to its own helper to work on at the same time, then checks that the fixes don't collide.