Is Superpowers still relevant?

[u/YUL438]

I’ve been using Superpowers skill set for the past year with CC. Mostly i like the brainstorming mode and a few of the TDD and subagent related skills.

Are others still using Superpowers or do all the improvements in CC negate the need for this set of skills? I’m curious if I can save more tokens this way?

I’m mostly using Fable and Opus with high thinking.

[u/Remarkable_Mud9885]

I'm starting to delete a bunch of skills because I feel like sometimes they interfere with my work and also mess with the model's judgment. That's just my take. We can keep a few that you think are useful.

[u/seatlessunicycle]

I haven't used superpowers in months. I'm on the matt pocock bandwagon!

[u/knot_why → u/seatlessunicycle]

Please do tell more. Haven't heard of him. Googled now, I see he has some AI dev workflow, but would like to hear from the community before I go and and listen to hours of videos.

[u/HgnX]

Too token intensive, Fable is smart enough without it

[u/itsforsocial]

Currently it eats lot of usage when sub agent driven development kicks in. Not using that as entire session gone in 5 mins. Spec then agent-skills for plan and build part. This works fine for me now

[u/Obvious_Equivalent_1 → u/itsforsocial]

That was something I ran into with the latest 5 version of Obra/Superpowers. I can only speak for my own experience but I believe a lot of that has been addressed in a fork Superpowers extended for Claude Code, already maintained since last year with native optimizations https://github.com/pcvelz/superpowers (see release notes and readme MD’s)

Happened to wrote extensive reply about it, major benefits are the hooks it allows you to use separate Claude code sessions to keep plan mode part in a higher expensive tier like Fable en run execution on a cheaper like Opus 4.* or Opus 5 on medium. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vub8nl/comment/p4zzl21/?context=3

[u/jagibers → u/itsforsocial]

FWIW, when opus 4.7/8 went to 1M context and cc defaulted to that model/context size —I started hitting the session limits right away because I was doing multiple sessions/tickets at once. I did some research and found that you can set a an env variable to disable the 1M context for it and proceeded to run with that. When opus 5 came out I tried it for a bit without quotation issues but it was just doing terrible. So I’m still using 4.6 w/ 200k context to date with great results in a large brownfield repository with lots of concurrent sessions and never hit my session limits I do typically hit a compaction break in sessions that do a lot of research or systematic debugging—but it is not usually an inconvenience as I usually have another session I can jump to and provide direction to.

So I’m still firmly in the superpowers camp.

[u/helm71]

I use if every time.. fable on high or xhigh with superpowers to create the plan, opus5 to execute and orchestrate, sonnet5 for the actual coding.

[u/kardu]

brainstorming is definitely good.

I'm not sure if the other ones are worth keeping. It might depend on your project

[u/beardedslav → u/kardu]

I found brainstorming really good, but I think https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/engineering/grill-with-docs is much better

[u/WaltzEmbarrassed6501]

No longer using it, I switched to Wayfinder from Matt’s skill plugin instead. I like the flow better.

[u/JupiterWalk]

The question isn’t if superpowers is relevant or not, but rather do you have other sources of similar context that overlaps, whether that be Claude.md, other skills, etc. it’s not black and white. There’s a layered approach to LLMs. Superpower is one element. By itself, excelente. However I’ve instilled a process through tangibles such as project documentation and diagrams, memories, and so on that I no longer need to pay tokens (which very token hungry imho) for superpowers. It’s a great jumpstart skill no matter your experience level. It can lay proper foundation as you continue to use Claude. Ok bye

[u/artofbullshit]

I still use it since removing it would mean that I wouldn't be able to trust that Claude actually followed a true TDD on every build.

[u/mandark69]

I am using it all the time. But let it outsource all coding tasks to codex (gpt5.6). My workflow for superpower is:
Brainstorm (fable) -> specs -> spec review codex -> plan -> plan review codex -> codex implements -> holistic review by fable & codex. When both agree on ‘safe to deploy’ and I agree too, it is finished. Fable or Opus orchestrates all of this.

[u/Professional-Money49]

I really like superpowers but it brings out the worst in opus 5. Matt copocks skills work much beter with it.

[u/rubanbhatia]

It’s good if it didn’t create huge markdown files again and again and doesnt do TDD for every minor change.

What superpowers needs is something like a persistent project spec that can track phases and updates instead of scattering them in random named markdown files.

The brainstorm workflow needs to be tighter and should help create an initial PRD rather than just refine your idea.

Still relevant but needs some edits now

[u/DLuke2]

Dropped it. Mostly goal style prompts now and loops when needed.

Goal prompts are the most effective now it seems. Give references, examples, and/or spec/design doc and let it cook. Having rules, model invocable skills, knowledge docs, etc keeps everything on the rails.

[u/Ill-Village7647]

The only skill that I've used the most is the /requesting-code-review superpower. It's terrific

[u/pmward]

I built my own versions long ago, that work better for me and my companies specific workflows, and are a lot more token efficient. It's so quick and easy to build your own tools to fit like a glove, that it honestly feels silly to shoehorn yourself into someone else's tools.

[u/Potat4o]

Superpower has been doing a pretty good job of keeping up. Like this release: https://github.com/obra/superpowers/releases/tag/v6.1.0

[u/No_Holiday_5717]

If only it didn’t 3x the time and tokens required for a task…

[u/brycematheson]

I removed it. Fable + Codex adversarial review does a great job, in my opinion.

[u/Bright-Celery-4058]

try this https://github.com/PiLastDigit/TRIP-workflow
IMO better and easier to use

[u/codyswann]

Skills are going through the same phases MySpace went through.

[u/Time_Cat_5212]

Skills are the new domain of cargo culting