alt Hacker NewsI've had a good experience with https://github.com/obra/superpowers. At first glance this looks similar. Has anyone tried both who can offer a comparison?
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It's one of those things where having a structure is really helpful - I've used some similar prompt scaffolds, and the difference is very noticeable.
Another great technique is to use one of these structures in a repo, then task your AI with overhauling the framework using best practices for whatever your target project is. It works great for creative writing, humanizing, songwriting, technical/scientific domains, and so on. In conjunction with agents, these are excellent to have.
I think they're going to be a temporary thing - a hack that boosts utility for a few model releases until there's sufficient successful use cases in the training data that models can just do this sort of thing really well without all the extra prompting.
These are fun to use.
I've tried both. Each has pros and cons. Two things I don't like about superpowers is it writes all the codes into the implementation plan, at the plan step, then the subagents basically just rewrite these codes back to the files. And I have to ask Claude to create a progress.md file to track the progress if I want to work in multiple sessions. GSD pretty much solved these problems for me, but the down side of GSD is it takes too many turns to get something done.
I tried Superpowers for my current project - migrating my blog from Hugo to Astro (with AstroPaper theme). I wrote the main spec in two ways - 1) my usual method of starting with a small list of what I want in the new blog and working with the agent to expand on it, ask questions and so on (aka Collaborative Spec) and 2) asked Superpowers to write the spec and plan. I did both from the working directory of my blog's repo so that the agent has full access to the code and the content.
My findings:
1. The spec created by Superpowers was very detailed (described the specific fonts, color palette), included the exact content of config files, commit messages etc. But it missed a lot of things like analytics, RSS feed etc.
2. Superpowers wrote the spec and plan as two separate documents which was better than the collaborative method, which put both into one document.
3. Superpowers recommended an in-place migration of the blog whereas the collaborative spec suggested a parallel branch so that Hugo and Astro can co-exist until everything is stable.
And a few more difference written in [0].
In general, I liked the aspect of developing the spec through discussion rather than one-shotting it, it let me add things to the spec as I remember them. It felt like a more iterative discovery process vs. you need to get everything right the first time. That might just be a personal preference though.
At the end of this exercise, I asked Claude to review both specs in detail, it found a few things that both specs missed (SEO, rollback plan etc.) and made a final spec that consolidates everything.
I don't get why people need a cli wrapper for this. Can't you just use Claude skills and create everything you need?
Yes, and IMO Superpowers is better when you want to Get Not-Shit Done.
Get Shit Done is best when when you're an influencer and need to create a Potemkin SaaS overnight for tomorrow's TikTok posts.
I've used both From my experience, gsd is a highly overengineered piece of software that unfortunately does not get shit done, burns limits and takes ages while doing so. Quick mode does not really help because it kills the point of gsd, you can't build full software on ad-hocs. I've used plain markdown planning before, but it was limiting and not very stable, superpowers looks like a good middleground