superpowers VS skills

It's crazy to me that some GitHub repos, that were just created in the last year, have more stars then some of the most popular programming frameworks out there. At the time of writing, Superpowers, is around 226,000, ahead of the Vue repo and way ahead of Next.js. A separate repo based on Andrej Karpathy's coding advice has 174,000. And they aren't even code. They're folders of markdown files that tell your AI coding agent how to write software better.

Meanwhile, the ecosystem materialized. obra/superpowers shipped a complete software development methodology built on composable skills — 1,276+ stars and growing. The cobusgreyling/loop-engineering repo cataloged patterns from Osmani and Cherny into a practical reference.

Projects like Superpowers proved that agents can follow structured methodologies — brainstorm before coding, write tests before implementation, review against specs before declaring success. The skills are mandatory workflows, not suggestions. The agent checks for relevant skills before any task.

If you're looking for complementary skills and plugins then have a look at Addy Osmani's Agent Skills or Superpowers, both provide essential coding assistant skills like Test-Driven Development (TDD). OpenSpec provides consistency, and your workflow can evolve around it.

Before any implementation, I plan. I use the brainstorming skill from Superpowers to think through the approach, then Grill Me - a separate skill that probes for contradictions, gaps, and missing assumptions, question by question. Once I'm satisfied, I save the result as a PRD and move to writing-plans (also from Superpowers), which produces a detailed implementation plan: class names, properties, architecture, tests.

These don't replace the spec; they govern how the agent acts on it. Superpowers uses guided Q&A to clarify intent, then runs sub-agents behind a verification-before-completion gate. GSD manages context in waves for solo developers. HVE Core runs an RPI loop: Research, Plan, Implement, Review.

> It would be extremely cool to be able to write one or two lines of prompt in my harness, and have a light model iterate with me a few times writing/proposing requirements, guidelines and explanations, refining the prompt until it's ready to be sent to the actual LLM.

I feel like the vast majority of AI-using coders already do this via skills suites like Superpowers (see /superpowers:brainstorming), no? https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Repo: github.com/anthropics/skills

This last point is where most public bundles fail. Anthropic's own document skills (pdf, docx, xlsx, pptx) are source-available, not redistributable. Most paid Gumroad bundles ship them anyway. If you are a 2 to 10 person engineering team, that is a real legal exposure.

Two weeks before the SMB bundle, Anthropic released Agent Skills as an open standard with a partner-built directory featuring Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier. The anthropics/skills GitHub repository is the canonical reference.

An open standard. The format is published at agentskills.io, so the same SKILL.md file works across more than just Claude. Community marketplaces collectively list more than 4,000 skills as of May 2026. The official source remains github.com/anthropics/skills.

Anthropic's document skills: The docx, pdf, pptx, and xlsx skills that power Claude's document editing capabilities. Open source and a great reference for writing complex skills with scripts and supporting files.

GitHub: anthropics/skills — Official skill examples

This is purely a discipline layered on existing tools. Skill. Anthropic's own mcp-builder is itself a Skill, which is a hint.

Today, utilizing Agent Skills has become a best practice. The ecosystem is standardizing around this concept via initiatives like skills.sh, Anthropic's Skills implementation, and Google's Skills repository. In this article, I will detail the working principles of Agent Skills and demonstrate how to implement a serverless, Gemini CLI-inspired workflow using Google Apps Script (GAS).

Claude Code supports Skills — packaged instructions that extend Claude's capabilities. Anthropic publishes an official set at github.com/anthropics/skills.