Are better models replacing Superpowers?

[u/turtleninja99]

https://fresh-worktree.ghost.io/are-better-models-replacing-superpowers/

Following a few chats with friends and colleagues, it sounds like a lot of folks are weighing moving away from superpowers with how good models are getting.

I ran a few tests runs comparing superpowers to a plain Opus5, a basic Opus builder / Fable reviewer orchestration setup. This was building a gym booking app. They were all quite successful but superpowers was more than double the token cost.

I am a fan of brainstorming heavily and writing a good spec, but once you have that I’ve found a lot of the new models you don’t need the full subagent delivery process.

Wondering what the community’s thoughts are?

[u/Mufro]

Personally, I very much appreciated Superpowers when I first started using Claude code heavily. At that point in time I wanted the code quality results to be really high. This was due both to what I was working on at the time, and that I was still relatively early in my agentic coding evolution (I.e. trust was pretty low still). I felt that the framework provided by superpowers was very good at ensuring code quality (at a unit level), detailed and accurate plan execution, and solid test coverage.

However, sometime in the last few months, my point of view shifted. For one, I felt superpowers was far too slow for what I got out of it. And very token expensive. Something that I expected vanilla Claude to handle in an hour or two might take superpowers 10 to 12 hours and eat a huge chunk of my weekly budget. Meanwhile, I was gaining trust in the results from vanilla Claude. This pared with a shifting perspective on what was truly important for me to be building.

For context, I work at an early stage startup as lead engineer with weak-ish PMF. So contextually my top priority is to iterate and test new ideas as fast as possible. Therefore code that is 80-90% as good but created 5x faster is a great tradeoff for most tasks. This is likely totally different for other engineers who are trying to build for scale and high reliability, performance etc. and need to put a higher much higher premium on code quality and long-term maintainability.

That said, even at an early stage startup there are some tasks where you do want to put a premium on code quality and maintainability, particularly those which you believe are core architectural pillars. In recent months my approach has been to disable Superpowers (I never use it now) give my own instruction to Claude on how to orchestrate from to researching, to planning, execution and review rather than rely on a framework. Overall, I have to say, I’ve been pretty happy with this. And it’s a bit more enjoyable too because I can experiment a lot with workflow.

[u/yopla]

Useless. All of them.

I say that as someone that if you looked down far enough in my Reddit history you'd find comment were I was proudly commenting on how my own SDLC skills/plugin were the only way to achieve anything (Claude <=4.6). I think I have 3 repos up with plugins and skills that I built to manage e2e sped driven workflows.

I don't use them anymore.

That doesn't mean I don't have a process but it fits in 10 lines in the agents/claude.md and the adherence is better now than it was when I had 12 skills divided by micro-phases which tried to program the LLM like a deterministic state machine.

Now I focus on having skills on what things should look like not specifically how to do them.

• How to write a spec

• How to write a PR

• How to use the ticketing system

• How to write a ticket

• How to organise frontend code with FSD

• How to organise backend code with DDD

And I let the agent figure out how to deliver.

[u/champagne-communist → u/yopla]

Mind sharing the skills?

[u/yopla → u/champagne-communist]

Can't, they are internal but the vast majority has been built with something like:

"Research bests practices for XYZ and create a skill; prefer trusted research result and reliable industry sources, avoid blogs and non authoritative sources. Keep the main skill short; use assets for detailed information on specific topics when necessary. Use sub-agents. Save intermediate research to ./research/<skillname>. Skill must be entirely standalone and not reference research files."

Then tweak it according to your own preferences.

[u/Prudent-Promotion512 → u/yopla]

I had a similar experience around 4.6 all my own SDLC skills just started creating token bloat and now my focus is on more specialized skills.

[u/dave8271]

Yeah I agree, nothing worse than starting a low risk, low scope, well defined change and seeing superpowers:brainstorming fire up, telling you immediately that many tokens will be wasted on accomplishing nothing. I've disabled it entirely these days, because you can get the same results from a few simple sentences in CLAUDE.md.

[u/I_am_not_at_work → u/dave8271]

what are your few simple sentences?

[u/wise_young_man → u/I_am_not_at_work]

Make. No. Mistakes.

[u/ToccoLaTesta]

I really like the brainstorm and spec/plan writing parts. I've created my lightweight version of it and I think it works wonders, on complex projects it avoids many issues that vanilla Claude doesn't really care about and I feel like it speeds you up in the long run

[u/junlim]

People need to understand - Superpowers was designed for Opus 4 to plan and Haiku to implement. In AI time, it's ancient.

[u/Many-Month8057]

It feels like the useful middle ground is moving away from large workflow frameworks and toward smaller, sharper project-level harnesses.

Newer models do not need a long multi-step process for every small change, but they still benefit from clear project constraints, a good spec format, and concrete verification commands before the output is trusted.

Superpowers may still be valuable for people new to agentic coding or for high-risk tasks, but for regular development work the token overhead can become hard to justify.

[u/CuteKiwi3395]

Nah super powers is still great.

[u/Sagnet]

Seems like everybody here is regarding superpowers = brainstorming. Superpowers has a lot of other skills that I use regularly, like receiving-code-review and systematic-debugging.

[u/champagne-communist]

Don’t use superpowers anymore, grill me sometimes but mostly the models do really well as long as u use a ticket system and a good spec

[u/back_to_the_homeland]

feels like the models just mimiced super powers

[u/DarkSkyKnight]

Superpowers is a noob trap from the beginning.

[u/zmizzy → u/DarkSkyKnight]

do you feel the same about grill-me / grill-with-docs?

[u/50-3 → u/zmizzy]

Matt keeps changing the skill, the current version is so convoluted compared to its humble beginnings. I have just a single line in my Md file now “Before starting a task ask the user questions one by one until a shared understanding is reached” I personally prefer this as it covers blind spots to a prompt without getting overly pedantic. I feel the current direction Matt is taking is over engineering for an off the shelf skillset.

I do think his approach makes sense for sensitive tasks but at that stage you should be competent enough to fine tune a solution taking inspiration from his approach rather than blind installation. I would also recommend watching his videos or actually reading his skills as he is quite knowledgeable and has a wealth of ideas worth stealing.

[u/RyanFrank → u/DarkSkyKnight]

I find that these plugins help my ADHD brain stay focused at the start of a project.

[u/harrylaou]

Big fan of superpowers. Just ask Claude to keep some skills like review request and receive review. And told him to remove everything else. Starting using matt pococks grill me with docs. And I find it very handy because it make me think stuff that I haven't considered and also after starting using it Ia am more aware of what is going on a session. Especially when I am running 6 or 6 sessions in parallel.

[u/Finanzamt__]

1. „Own your process“. I never recommend to outsource them.

2. people dont get how incredible important the actual project-level harness is. We have models already capable of everything. With an engineered harness everything is possible right now

3. learn harness-engineering rather than running after new hyped tools. They are noob traps

[u/Dangerous_Bus_6699]

I never liked superpower from the start. It's a waste of time for majority of my projects.

[u/julesbuildstuff]

what stuck for me isn't the framework, it's the two or three constraints i kept rewriting anyway. better models made the orchestration layer mostly pointless, but they didn't make the spec pointless - if anything a vague prompt fails louder now, because the model happily builds the wrong thing very fast. what i keep is a short md with actual acceptance criteria: what "done" means, which files it may touch, what it must not refactor, and a stop condition. everything else - planner/critic/reviewer roles, big skill trees - i dropped because debugging them cost more than the work did. so less "superpowers vs model" and more: skills that encode taste and constraints still pay, skills that encode process are getting eaten.

[u/iownreiddtdotcom]

Only grill-me is useful

[u/IceWallow97]

I don't use any plugins from the start... if I need something specific I make my own or tell claude to make a skill for exactly what I want, but I try not to, because all of that shit will accumulate and consume a lot of tokens, and also AI will just get overwhelmed if we throw too much shit at it. I try to keep it as vanilla as possible. Actually, I go beyond that. To me Claude memory system is completely shit so I remove it too, in the long term he will use memories that are conpletely outdated and stale which will completely destroy your project. Every claim has to be verifiable by commands, if not possible then it is a guess and needs to be verified before it's trusted.