I have spent a lot of hours with coding agents, and for a while the experience was split down the middle. Half the time I got something useful in minutes. The other half, the agent set off confidently in the wrong direction, and I spent longer untangling its work than if I had written the thing myself. Superpowers, an open source plugin by Jesse Vincent (obra), is the first tool that reliably fixed the second half for me.
What it actually is
The idea is refreshingly plain. Superpowers is a library of skills, which are ordinary Markdown files that teach the agent how to do something and then insist that it does. There is no clever trick underneath. A skill fires at the right moment and walks the agent through a workflow that a careful engineer would recognise.
The workflow it enforces
Strung together, the skills follow the discipline I wish I always kept myself.
- Brainstorm first. It refuses to write code until it understands what I am really trying to build, then returns the spec in pieces short enough to read.
- Plan. It turns that spec into steps concrete enough for a junior with no context to follow.
- Test first. Real red then green: write the failing test, write the least code that passes, commit. YAGNI and DRY throughout.
- Delegate to subagents. Independent tasks go to fresh agents in their own git worktrees, with a review between stages so a long run does not drift.
- Review before merge. A final pass checks the work against the spec before anything lands.
The honest trade
It is slower to the first line of code. You give up the small thrill of an instant draft in return for far fewer wrong turns, which is a trade I would make anyway and one I keep failing to make on my own. In practice it feels less like prompting and more like pairing with someone who has better habits than me.
The part I keep thinking about is that the skills are just Markdown. You can read them, fork them, and the system can even mine your past sessions to write new ones. It is rare to find a tool that gets better the more you teach it.
Worth a look if agents are part of your day: obra/superpowers, and Jesse’s own post on the thinking behind it.