Superpowers

Superpowers pairs a skills framework with a development methodology, published under MIT by Jesse Vincent and the Prime Radiant team, and carrying over 130,000 GitHub stars. The organizing idea is a refusal to let a coding agent start with code. When a project is detected, the agent opens with brainstorming to establish the real requirement, presents the specification in chunks short enough that a human will actually read and approve them, then produces an implementation plan before the first line is written.

The instructions themselves are SKILL.md markdown files, spanning testing (strict red/green TDD, async tests, anti-patterns), debugging, collaboration, development (git worktrees, branch management, subagent workflows), and meta-skills for writing and sharing new skills. Vincent's October 2025 note frames these as persistent, testable, shareable artifacts rather than prompts, and describes pressure testing them against extreme simulated scenarios plus extracting skills from technical books.

The token budget is where the design shows its hand: the core injects under 2,000 tokens at startup, with additional skills loaded on demand by a shell script that finds and reads them. A «mémoire conversationnelle SQLite» layer duplicates «Claude Code» transcripts outside the .claude directory to survive automatic deletion after a month, indexes them with vector search, and summarizes via Claude Haiku.

Support extends to «Claude Code» through its native plugin system, and to «Cursor», Codex and OpenCode by manual install. YAGNI and DRY sit underneath, an argument that automation should tighten software discipline rather than loosen it.