Superpowers

Superpowers is obra's open-source skills framework — a curated set of composable skills (TDD, code review, debugging, refactoring, brainstorming) designed to chain together inside any agentskills.io-compatible coding agent. It is the most-adopted third-party skills framework outside Anthropic's own examples and pairs directly with the existing Superpowers 6: Parallel Agents concept page on this site.

When to use

• You want a code-review / TDD workflow that activates automatically on relevant triggers
• You're running a coding agent on a non-trivial repo and want a known-good skills baseline
• You maintain a team-standard procedure and want it expressed as a skills chain, not a doc

When not to use

• The framework is opinionated (TDD-first, spec-first) — if your team's process differs, you'll fight it
• You're on a tiny project where the skills' context overhead outweighs their value

How it works

Superpowers ships as a repo of individual SKILL.md files, each scoped to a single workflow step. The agent loads only the relevant skill on trigger, and the skills are designed to hand off cleanly to one another (e.g., a "brainstorm" skill's output becomes the input to a "write-spec" skill). This is the most explicit demonstration of the standard's progressive-disclosure design in the wild.

Install

npx skills add obra/superpowers

Full SKILL.md

Full source at the canonical repo: github.com/obra/superpowers. Embedded copy omitted at launch; the repo is a multi-skill tree and the canonical source is the right place to read individual skills with their current state.

Verify it yourself

Quick static check — clone to scratch, grep for the standard red-flag patterns, and confirm the allowed-tools for each individual skill is bounded. Superpowers is a collection; the right verification is per-skill, not per-repo.

Two-model review — for each individual skill you intend to use, paste that skill's SKILL.md (not the whole repo) into two different models with the Vetting Guide prompt. Pay attention to skills that touch Bash or Edit — these are the highest-capability skills in the framework and the most likely targets for hidden instructions.

Review transparency

Related

• Superpowers 6: Parallel Agents — the concept page on this site
• Skills Collection Overview
• Vetting Guide