Like others I found superpowers helpful maybe 4 months ago. The models don't seem to need it anymore. I also don't have the same prompting issues the author has. Opus 5.5 tends to develop the spec, assumes I agree, and builds it. I make my sandwich and come back to a spec md, a diff, other evidence of completion. I use cc cli with a cmux-like platform it can control (ie open tabs showing specs, diffs itself).
It was tongue in cheek but the idea was that having a super perfect plan is the Waterfall method while "we" (contemporary software developers) are working Agile now, meaning we are starting somehere and adapting the plan while we go.
I have agents working on plans for days on their own with just a plan doc and a relatively simple prompt. I usually check the commits once in a while to see what's happening. I'm not sure how superlite would improve that.
I don't think the model is needed anymore. I think given the new kind of things that are happening in the AI world, I've been using Gemini 3.8 Flash for a long time, I've been using Claude, Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 and literally find no reason at all to use SuperPars or SuperLight for that matter.
Looking at the comments here it's clear that there's a lack of understanding about what skills fundamentally are, they're process or procedure.
The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.
If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.
Most of the comments here seem to focus on specific things people were trying to get out of skills, and whether those are still needed.
That is going to vary a lot.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to have a process that made your model work "properly" on tasks, sure that's probably not needed anymore.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to get a consistent set of artifacts alongside what was developed (quality varying, so i mean consistent here as "one design plan, one implementation plan", not "good"), nothing has changed, models do not do this consistently, in a durable fashion, without something telling them to do this.
Yes, for example, newer Opus will often decide to write a spec. But not always, and not with any consistent format or ...
If you want that to happen, you'd still need a skill making it happen.
If you don't care about that, then sure, you don't need the skill anymore.
People seem to have used various skills to achieve different things, and so have wildly different views on what is still necessary.
I think I don't understand what you mean by process. I just tell the LLM what process I want it to follow, e.g. follow the plan document, use cheaper subagents when appropriate, respond to PR comments before merging, etc. It's usually a short paragraph.
I do use skills for other things, I don't believe that skills are bad. I'm just not sure what they add in this case.
may be needed with lower tier or older models. my experience with the newer models are that these actively hurt their performance and burn tokens needlessly. You still need an agents.md specific to your project but not broad skills anymore. Because the software development best practices seem to have been baked into them at post training time.
And we thought the world was changing fast in the es6 days of JavaScript.
We use to say “web development is changing fast” when a thing changed after two years, and now it looks like it was changing at a snail’s pace compared to AI.
This looks cool but does it build as well as superpowers? One thing about using more than one implementation agent is agents may end up working on each others work. How does this prevent that?
I thought superpowers was the coolest thing for about 1 day. Then the endless approval prompts and huge time increase killed it for me. I'm finding Opus 5.5 does a pretty thorough job without anything like superpowers. What would I be getting from superlite that Opus 5.5 doesn't do by itself already, and are those things actually important, or do they mostly only serve to give you peace of mind?
My opinion is that it’s a lot like the brief trend for describing yourself as a prompt engineer when getting images out of models like DALL-E 2.
Yeah, for five minutes you needed to use a specific style, very specific language patterns and what have you, in order to get results that were a cut above. But then the models and the harnesses got better and that moment passed.
The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.
If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.
Most of the comments here seem to focus on specific things people were trying to get out of skills, and whether those are still needed.
That is going to vary a lot.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to have a process that made your model work "properly" on tasks, sure that's probably not needed anymore.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to get a consistent set of artifacts alongside what was developed (quality varying, so i mean consistent here as "one design plan, one implementation plan", not "good"), nothing has changed, models do not do this consistently, in a durable fashion, without something telling them to do this.
Yes, for example, newer Opus will often decide to write a spec. But not always, and not with any consistent format or ...
If you want that to happen, you'd still need a skill making it happen.
If you don't care about that, then sure, you don't need the skill anymore.
People seem to have used various skills to achieve different things, and so have wildly different views on what is still necessary.
I do use skills for other things, I don't believe that skills are bad. I'm just not sure what they add in this case.
We use to say “web development is changing fast” when a thing changed after two years, and now it looks like it was changing at a snail’s pace compared to AI.
Why not just tell Claude to figure it out and build what it needs? Why do I need a plugin or a factory or whatever.
I just ask “can you go faster?” And claude suggests some stuff and mostly just works autonomously.
Yeah, for five minutes you needed to use a specific style, very specific language patterns and what have you, in order to get results that were a cut above. But then the models and the harnesses got better and that moment passed.