emschwartzA Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)
https://emschwartz.me/a-rave-review-of-superpowers-for-claude-code/
How is it better than https://github.com/gsd-build/gsd-2 ?
GitHub - gsd-build/gsd-2: A powerful meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven development system that enables agents to work for long periods of time autonomously without losing track of the big picture
A powerful meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven development system that enables agents to work for long periods of time autonomously without losing track of the big picture - gsd-bui...
> Plan mode helped a bit. However, in Plan mode, Claude would write up a giant plan document and ask for feedback. It's hard to review a multi-page plan. Making matters worse, if you give it feedback, it would respond with a whole new version of the multi-page plan. That's not a productive way to plan out a project or feature.
It's sure baffling how Anthropic has kept Claude Code's plan mode so linear and inflexible. It may ask a couple of questions before writing it, but there's always going to be parts that need editing. Yet there's no good "Sounds good, but it needs these edits" option after it presents you the plan. It gives you (paraphrased) "1. Proceed with auto-edits 2. Proceed without auto-edits 3. Cancel the plan". Note that 3 doesn't even write the plan to the file at all, even if it's 95% fine. So your options are either A. Pick 1 or 2, immediately press escape to interrupt, then tell it to make edits or B. Pick 3, tell it to make edits, after which it has to write the entire plan from scratch again.
This is such bad UX that it really feels like either 1. Anthropic employees don't use Claude Code much - this seems incredibly unlikely or 2. It's intended to burn output tokens as it has to write a huge plan again.
IMO Superpowers isn't the ideal solution because it too lacks flexibility, but including the "plan sketch" stage is sure an improvement.
There's also:
4. Tell claude what to do instead, which will update the plan base on what you say.
5. Add comments to the plan directly - similar to 4 - but you can comment on specific parts.
Note: I use the VSCode extension, not sure if it differs in terminal mode.
Online reviews indicate that Superpowers is best for people who are not already experienced SW development managers.
Is that true? What is your experience of it?
For me, I am a solid KISS believer, so I have not yet found a better framework than just plain old Claude Code. But happy to move to a better workflow, if it's real.
Overall I think it's useful.
Superpowers has several skills. Its core workflow is:
- Brainstorm with you to design a spec
- Use subagents to review its own spec, then get your approval
- Based on the spec, write a plan, use subagents to review before final approval
- Use subagents to implement (using TDD)
I think that the brainstorming skill [1] is great. It helps flesh out a rough early idea. I also like that it uses subagents to adversarially review its own spec/plan; that has caught several things I would've missed. I do not like the separation of spec/plan; IMO the models are good enough to get straight to coding once the spec is written. The plan often ends up being code blocks in a Markdown doc.
[1]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers/tree/main/skills/brainst...
The install mechanism for the superpowers plugin for codex and opencode is .... interesting. From https://github.com/obra/superpowers
Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/superpowers/refs/head...
it's like curl|bash but with added LLM agents...
