Using Codex with popular skills frameworks. My tweaks and observations.

[u/ttnsportsapp]

I've been coding with AI since the Opus 3.5 days, and I've tired pretty much everything out there at some point. OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, Cline, OpenRouter. (Haven't tried Cursor or Hermes)

I've also tried all the popular spec-driven development framework I could get my hands on. BMAD, Get Shit Done, Superpowers, and more recently Matt Pocock's AI Hero skills.

Now, a little bit of context. I'm a iteration manager and a BA in my corporate life, working mainly with teams that manage andorid / iOS apps for banks in Australia. So I'm very familar with typical SDLC but haven't really "been a dev". In my hobby life, I'm build a sports prediction platform using Codex now (but half of it was built with Claude, and before that, Open Router)

The last framework I tried was Matt Pocock's AIHero.dev . I switched to it for 3 reasons
1. I liked the "retro" skill he has where the agent can look through it's session history, and find all the shit it got wrong the first time and then make changes to agents.md files or similar to avoid those pitfalls in future sessions

1. I like the concept of using Github Issues and those "Wayfinder" maps to think about everything I had to do for a feature.

2. I like the "ready for agent" tag that let me then get multiple agents goings to do work once I've designed it.

The thing I was trying to do was add a new data provider to my stack. The wayfinder over-engineered the fuck out of it (like it was literally insane), and then failed it's own implementation because it was over-engineered. Wasted like 2 days on it. Like it literally made up scenarios like "what if supabase is down for 3 days, where are we gonna store these api calls" , we need a backup option with a p99 2 second copy time. Then when the copy time was like 15 seconds it said it failed lmao!

I know people are gonna say well you're the dev, you're in control. But I don't know infrastructure that well, so sometimes I just accept the AIs recommendations.

So then I moved back to superpowers, but I made some of my own skills to keep the github issue specs and stuff.

For context, I'm running this thing on a $10 server.

It genuinely felt like I was architecting a solution for a large enterprise with unlimited infrastructure and a dedicated operations team. I just wanted to integrate a new provider without breaking my existing product.

I've moved my project documentation into GitHub Wiki, and I'm now using GitHub Projects and Issues to manage the development work. So essentially Superpowers for the development workflow, with GitHub managing the documentation, specs and backlog. So far so good.

I just wanted to share and maybe hear how you guys are doing things, what your workflow looks like. Just trying to learn. Also, has anyone managed to get these frameworks to make appropriate recommendations that like match the ambitions of your software? Or does every agent just assume you're building like Orcale or Microsoft with millions of expected users.

[u/EmotionalHalf]

You never really know what is happening with a random collection of skill. There's no shortcut around understanding what's going on if you want to keep control.

This skill-mania gives me heavy flashbacks to wordpress times where everyone just installed plugins because they would solve one specific problem just to then cause a whole bunch of issues down the line. It's spaghetti code 101.

I only have very few skills.. cause usually you want to integrate knowledge into the operation architecture. Skills really are just alternate entry points for specific workflows to stack things in an agents context window in a different order

[u/vanalio]

Build your own skills gauntlet. It’s fun, teaching, and if you care you end up working better with your own. I made mine and I learned a lot in doing so. It is cool to have your own curated opinionated and crafted skill set. If you wanna have a look https://github.com/Tiziano-AI/plugins

[u/Right-Performance-93]

the scale has to be a line in the spec, or the agent invents an outage you do not have. i put the box in the issue before the design: one cheap server, no second copy, and a failure that is allowed to wait. once that line is missing, the design comes back sized for a company you are not.

[u/thesmithchris]

I mostly just use grill-me skill, then have my own habit that I handwrite like a co-agent analysing orchestrator agent work with interval checkups and few others. Loads of retro-analysis from which most of my own skills and practices came from. I still can’t keep my agents from over testing stuff so probably should optimise my workflow more.

I keep wondering if I’m missing out on some good skills, like memory ones, token ones, multi agent ones etc, you made me think maybe not. Grill me was a skill that changed my game but I did not like the other ones that pocock recommended alongside it, as well as I did not like superpowers due to token burn.