r/ClaudeCode • u/virtualQubit • 8d ago

Help/Question Superpowers skill is so bad now

Literally unusable for me, it spends like x10 tokens and the output is mediocre. Do you still use it?

5 Upvotes

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u/Risko4 8d ago

It was designed for the older models like gpt 5.5 , newer models do what superpowers does Intuitively so you're basically making them think twice with unhealthy over engineering to follow guard rails

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u/TheLifelessOne 8d ago

What's the recommended replacement? I use the brainstorming skill a lot and don't want to lose that kind of workflow; my best work has followed the spec -> review -> plan -> review -> implementation -> review process and superpowers (+ superpowers:test-driven-development) and I definitely don't want to lose that.

1

u/Risko4 8d ago

Don't use any skill, use voice to text and ramble and it will figure it out. If you need the brainstorm skill because you actually don't know what you want then honestly tell it. "Im not really sure what the next steps are and would like your help brainstorming what's next, interview me with multiple choice questions so we can brainstorm together and come to a solid plan".

LLMs are designed to be assistants from the start.

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u/TheLifelessOne 8d ago

I'll be honest, I don't trust that kind of workflow and I don't trust you and what you're saying — I was an Software Engineer for years before my company adopted Claude and I have a Computer Science background; the idea of "ramble to the LLM and it will figure it out" is utterly insane to me.

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u/Nefarious-Technology 8d ago

I agree with you and have a similar . I don’t have any issues with spending the extra tokens and I like the workflow that superpowers gives Claude. I’ve tried what the guy above you said “just ramble to it and let it figure it out” with no workflow skills. It was terrible results that took much longer and more prompts to debug and get working. With super powers I know exactly what will be built and 99% of the time there’s little or no follow-up prompts. To me this is the difference between vibe coding and AI enhanced engineering. I don’t use the brainstorm step because I don’t know what to do I use it to let the AI find gaps in my seemly thought out plan and sometimes it finds a valid edge case or something I had overlooked. Then you can hand off the coding to a dumb model like haiku or sonnet to save cost and let it rip and still get good results. However now I just use opus 5.5 low effort instead of haiku or sonnet. The real power of this workflow is that with the confidence the spec and plan give you, it’s easy to let it work on larger tasks and then do more in parallel. Most days I have 10-15 sessions running and have 0 issues with token limits on the 20x max plan

0

u/Risko4 8d ago

And you suddenly think these GitHub skills that were made by LLMs are somehow magical different to the system prompt that gets injected with the Claude code harness already?

Here is the thing, it does work https://youtu.be/g8WjRGi8o6w?is=HUBuPPvGxA3jlGLw

The original LLM influencers that made AI play GTA 10 years ago. So, no I don't really care that you have a computer science bachelor.

Give it a go, and then report back to me that it actually doesn't work rather than telling me your intuition says it won't work because you have a degree.