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obra
superpowers
Shell2025–2026
obra / superpowers

superpowers

An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works.

64Distinct people
77Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
316.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

https://github.com/obra/superpowers I use Opus/Sol with for /brainstorming, deepseek (on Pi) for /subagent-driven-development I love it, the docs are easily editable and when…

cthulberg used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.

Locating the source of a mysterious beep direct repository linkDebated

The discussion centers on a project using AI and networked microphones to locate a mysterious beep, with users debating the practical efficiency of this high-tech approach versus simple manual methods like physical binary search or unpacking boxes. Participants also argue over whether the project represents genuine learning and utility or merely an unnecessary expenditure of computational resources for a trivial problem.

172 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month77 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2025-10-11 14:41:58 UTC to 2026-09-26 02:10:10 UTC.

0369122025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 commentsOct 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 2 submissions, 8 comments2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 3 submissions, 6 commentsMar 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 3 submissions, 9 comments2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsSep 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Oct 20252025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC615
Nov 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC303
Dec 20252025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
Jan 20262026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC725
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC1028
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC936
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC1239
May 20262026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC523
Jun 20262026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC624
Jul 20262026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
Aug 20262026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Sep 20262026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

12 sources
I haven't really shared what I use, I'm still deciding if that's something I want to do. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, you could install https://github.com/obra/superpowers/ into both Codex and Claude Code -- You'll find that the behavior is remarkably similar if you A/B compare them on the same problems. CC occasionally misses things that Codex gets and vice versa. Overall the output structure and final code is remarkably similar... Which is pretty different than if you just run them with their default system prompts. I'd throw codex out the window with its default outputs.
In Claude.ai and API unavailable [fixed]
> If you’re using agents to program, what are you doing while they work? If I am using agents I try to do something that is closely related to the task they are on. Otherwise I am just context switching once they are done and I want to review the work, which makes it difficult to focus on that task. I also don't try to run too many agents at the same time as that is just madness. That's just herding cats at that point. > As a side note, having Codex review Claude’s work (or vice-versa) throws up so many show-stopper issues (even with plan, revise, implement, review loops), I feel like you’d have to be nuts to just have a bunch of agents YOLOing it Solely relying on agents is bad regardless. It certainly is the easy route and our brains are wired to take the easy/lazy approach. But even with how good models have gotten in the past year th
Read the rest
ey still do make mistakes. In fact, they are now at a level where the hallucinations aren't obvious making it even more important to keep a close eye on the result. If you do want to lean more heavily into agents doing most of the work, try to make sure they are following proper development practices. Something they don't actually do by default but using something like the superpowers skills makes a world of difference: https://github.com/obra/superpowers Having them follow TDD helps a lot. I've even considered adding a QA agent/skill in here expanding things further to not just unit tests and some basic manual tests but also creating proper automated tests (following the test automation pyramid principles) to create an entire test suite. Not to actually give more control to LLMs, but because it allows me to more easily spot where things go sideways. Since more tests, including e2e tests and UI tests where possible let me review more aspects of the work they do. Having said that, I haven't created that skill yet. As reviewing the work of multiple agents is already exhausting as is. I am not in a position where I have to use AI or else in my company so instead I have dialed down my agentic usage by quite a lot to the point where I barely use agents anymore. To me using LLMs mostly as tools outside the process still is the sweet spot.
In Ask HN: What are you doing during inference?
I just use /brainstorming from https://github.com/obra/superpowers/tree/main Then I tell it to write a high level plan. And then rum subagents to create detailed plans from each of the steps in the high-level one. All olans must include the what, the why, and the how. Works surprisingly well, especially for greenfield projects. You have to manually revie the code though. No amount of agentic code review will fix the idiocy LLMs routinely produce.
In My AI-Assisted Workflow
julian37·Apr 7, 2026Recommendation phrase
Use planning+execution rather than one-shotting, it'll let you push back on stuff like this. I recommend brainstorming everything with https://github.com/obra/superpowers, at least to start with. Then work on making sure the LLM has all the info it needs. In this example it sounds like perhaps your hypothetical data model would need to be better typed and/or documented. But yeah as of today it won't pick up on smells as you do, at least not without extra skills/prompting. You'll find that comforting or annoying depending on where you stand...
In Claude Code is locking people out for hours
yuzhengxu·Apr 7, 2026Submission

Show HN: OneManCompany The first AI company with real corporate org structure

We built an AI company. Not a chatbot wrapper — a company with HR, COO, engineers, and designers, all AI agents, organised and managed the way a real company operates. You're the CEO, the only human. To be clear: this is not one LLM with a bunch of prompts pretending to be a team. These are fully independent agents — different models, different backends, different runtimes — each doing their own job. *Why organise agents as a company* We spent a year building multi-agent systems and kept hitting the same wall. Agents say "I'm done" and pass results downstream with no verification. Errors cascade through the whole project. Static workflows (Dify etc.) are stable but can't adapt to the new skills+harness agent paradigm. Free-form negotiation between agents doesn't converge. The root issue: agents are getting individually stronger, but witho
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ut organisational management they can't collaborate effectively. It's like having a room full of talented people with no management structure — capability is there, coordination isn't. Human companies solved this centuries ago. Performance reviews, SOPs, org hierarchy, hiring pipelines, retrospectives — these mechanisms make collaboration work regardless of domain. We applied the same principles to AI agent teams. *How it works* The company has a founding team (HR, COO, EA, CSO) built in from day one. Talent Market. When the company needs specialists, HR recruits from a community-driven Talent Market ([one-man-company.com](https://one-man-company.com)). Verified agent implementations with real usage counts and community reviews, not LLMs self-declaring expertise. Claude Code, OpenClaw, LangGraph agent families are already on the market — [superpowers](https://github.com/obra/superpowers), [agency-agents](https://github.com/msitarzewski/agency-agents) are ready to hire ([browse here](https://one-man-company.com/talent/claude-superpowers)). The market is open for contributions: upload your own agents, share/buy/sell. We're building a real agent community. Talent-Container separation. Each agent is split into a portable identity (Talent: prompts, skills, tools, work principles) and an execution runtime (Container: LangGraph, Claude CLI, script process). Different agents run on completely different backends in the same project — Claude Code writes code, LangGraph handles image generation, OpenClaw runs admin. Tree Search based Orchestrate Algorithm. Tasks decompose dynamically during execution, not upfront in a fixed pipeline. The underlying algorithm is built on AND-tree DAG structure with formal guarantees: termination (bounded retries + timeouts + cost budgets), deadlock freedom (cycle detection at insertion), crash recovery (processing nodes reset on restart). Quality gates. Every task has acceptance criteria and mandatory supervisor review. Self-evolution. Post-project retrospectives update work principles and org-wide SOPs. CEO 1-on-1s become permanent agent memory. Performance reviews with real consequences: PIP for underperformers, then offboarding if they don't improve. HR re-recruits from the Talent Market. *Results* Cross-domain without changing the framework. So far, we have tried 1) Game dev; 2) Audiobook and Short Movie Generating; 3) Auto-Researchurvey; 4) Content Generation; 5) More is comming! Same system, different team, different domain. Build a game today, produce a comic series tomorrow. *Try it* Fully open source. [one-man-company.com](https://one-man-company.com) is the front door. One command: GitHub: https://github.com/1mancompany/OneManCompany Talent Market: https://one-man-company.com Come try it, file issues, or contribute. We especially want people building agents for the Talent Market.
1 points · Open discussion
That is the kind of thing that I've been fighting by being super explicit in CLAUDE.md. For whatever reason, instead of being much more thorough and making sure that files are being changed only after fully understanding the scope of the change (behaviour prior to Feb/Mar), Claude would just jump to the easiest fix now, with no backwards compatibility thinking and to hell with all existing tests. What is even worse is I've seen it try and edit files before even reading them on a couple of occasions, which is a big red flag. (/effort max) Another thing that worked like magic prior to Feb/Mar was how likely Claude was to load a skill whenever it deduced that a skill might be useful. I personally use [superpowers][1] a lot, and I've noticed that I have to be very explicit when I want a specific skill to be used - to the point that I have to
Read the rest
reference the skill by name. [1]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers
In Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates
iamandoni·Apr 3, 2026Submission

Show HN: Arxitect – Agentic Plugin for Architecture and Design Patterns

Modern coding agents are getting exceptionally good at implementing a given coding task. And with validation-in-the-loop, you can be reasonably confident they will implement a correct solution. However, their implementation often leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't adhere to the decades of software design best-practices that the community has established and is often myopic to broader software quality attributes like maintainability and extensibility. To make things worse, this low code quality compounds as coding agents implement additional tasks. Coding agents often burn context, waste tokens, implement partial solutions, or miss major components of coding tasks because they naturally implement repetitive, brittle, and tactical code. Software design principles weren't meant to be just for humans. They were meant to make all code easi
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er and safer to read, understand, refactor, modify, extend, test, and maintain. Arxitect helps coding agents build robust software through best practice design and architecture. It helps coding agents write better code. And in turn, coding agents become more efficient and more accurate. I was inspired by the design of [Superpowers](https://github.com/obra/superpowers) and extended that concept to software design principles: * API Design - Assessing naming conventions, method signatures, parameter design, type safety, and REST endpoint design. * Object Oriented Design - Assessing SOLID principles, DRY violations, composition vs. inheritance choices, and design pattern applicability. * Clean Architecture - Assessing component cohesion, component coupling, and quality attributes like maintainability, extensibility, and testability. Install in Claude Code with: /plugin marketplace add andonimichael/arxitect /plugin install arxitect@arxitect /reload-plugins I welcome any feedback, advice, or PRs at: https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect
3 points · Open discussion
Overall I think it's useful. Superpowers has several skills. Its core workflow is: - Brainstorm with you to design a spec - Use subagents to review its own spec, then get your approval - Based on the spec, write a plan, use subagents to review before final approval - Use subagents to implement (using TDD) I think that the brainstorming skill [1] is great. It helps flesh out a rough early idea. I also like that it uses subagents to adversarially review its own spec/plan; that has caught several things I would've missed. I do not like the separation of spec/plan; IMO the models are good enough to get straight to coding once the spec is written. The plan often ends up being code blocks in a Markdown doc. [1]: https://github.com/obra/superpowers/tree/main/skills/brainst...
In A Rave Review of Superpowers (For Claude Code)

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