Claims are fidelity and variance, not dollars (full attribution in the
superpowers-evals experiment log, 2026-06-11 L1 entry):
- Global Constraints header: 0/5 -> 5/5 adoption in micro-tests, exact
values verbatim; makes constraints mechanically propagatable to briefs
and reviewers (a version-floor violation class shipped because they
weren't). The one fix wave in the elicited full runs was a version-floor
catch this header enabled.
- Per-task Interfaces blocks: 0 -> 100% of tasks, exact signatures,
within-plan consistent; removes the controller's per-dispatch interface
re-derivation.
- Task right-sizing: 9.4 -> 8.4 mean tasks at svelte scale (kills
standalone Types/README micro-tasks); no effect at small scale.
- End-to-end (opus-written plan executed under SDD): guidance plan ran 1
fix wave vs control's 2-4 (control plan shipped a real Sierpinski bug);
execution cost equal within noise.
E30 replay: the planted-DRY catch is causally determined by the
controller-composed constraints block (0/6 with process-shaped vs 5/6
with the spec's own wording). E31 micro: this recipe doubles the rate
at which composed blocks carry the spec's cross-component relationship
(6/6 vs 3/6). Affects dev and the redesign equally (E29: both 4/5).
scripts/review-package generates the reviewer's input deterministically:
commit list, stat summary, and net diff with -U10 context, written to a
file from an explicit BASE. Live runs showed controllers improvising
'git diff HEAD~1..HEAD', which silently truncates multi-commit tasks,
and svelte's five fix dispatches shipped without re-running any tests —
fix dispatches now explicitly carry the implementer's
re-run-and-report contract.
The skill read as a changelog: 'combined task review,' 'one reviewer,
one reading,' 'one dispatch,' and an example still showing diffs pasted
into prompts. A reader who never saw the two-reviewer design has no
referent for 'combined.' Prose now states the design directly, and the
flowchart/example reflect the diff-file handoff.
Paste adoption stayed at 0/15 even as a Red Flag — and the controller's
reluctance is locally rational: pasting loads the diff into the (most
expensive) controller context permanently, while a reviewer self-fetch
costs a few cheap turns. The diff-file handoff is cheap for both sides:
the controller redirects git diff to /tmp without reading it, and the
reviewer gets the whole change in one Read call.
Fourth planted-defect failure mode: the implementer's self-report said
'noted mild structural duplication; left unabstracted per YAGNI' and the
reviewer deferred to that framing, rating the duplication no finding at
all. The pre-judging keeps relocating — controller prompt, then reviewer
calibration, now the implementer's report. Rationales are claims; they
never downgrade severity.
Adoption was 6/11 reviews on fractals and 0/17 on svelte when phrased
as guidance; reviewers without the diff re-derive it by hand, which is
the single largest remaining reviewer cost. Now a Red Flags Never entry
and a REQUIRED marker on the template placeholder.
With merged review, a planted verbatim-duplication defect shipped: the
reviewer rated it Minor (YAGNI) under the strict cannot-be-trusted
definition of Important, and the Minor-rolls-up rule meant no fix was
ever dispatched and the final review never saw the finding. Calibration
now names merge-blocking maintainability damage (verbatim duplication,
swallowed errors, assertion-free tests) as Important, and controllers
must paste accumulated Minor findings into the final review dispatch.
Iteration-1 profiling: implementers and per-dispatch overhead dominate
(429 of 686 subagent turns; controller coordination is half the dollars
and scales with dispatch count), reviewers are individually lean, and
the controller pasted the diff in only 2 of 22 review dispatches when
the guidance was phrased as optional.
Changes: spec-reviewer-prompt.md + code-quality-reviewer-prompt.md
replaced by task-reviewer-prompt.md (one reviewer, one reading of a
pasted diff, two verdicts: spec compliance ✅/❌/⚠️ and task quality);
one fix dispatch can address both kinds of findings; controller now
runs git diff itself and pastes it (imperative, not optional);
implementers run focused tests while iterating and the full suite once
before committing; flowchart, example, Red Flags, tool tables updated.
The broad final whole-branch review is unchanged.
Round-2 fractals eval regressed to 70min/32.2M tokens (vs round-1's
42.8min/14.5M) while reaching baseline-parity quality. Per-subagent turn
profiling attributed it to: haiku dispatches taking 2-3x the turns of
sonnet (678 of 1197 subagent turns), reviewers re-fetching diffs by hand
(518 Bash calls), and evidence-rule narration. Changes: turn-count-beats-
token-price model guidance; controllers paste small diffs into reviewer
prompts (reviewers then need few or no tool calls); evidence scoped to
findings and would-be-bare-yes checks; Important defined as cannot-trust-
until-fixed with coverage suggestions Minor; fixes dispatched only for
Critical/Important.
Resumed the offending eval controller session and asked it why it
pre-judged despite the rule being in context. Its retrospective: the
motive was avoiding a review loop, the abstract rule was read but not
applied at the moment it governs, and a phrase-level trigger ('do not
flag', 'at most Minor', 'don't treat X as a defect', 'the plan chose')
would have fired where the principle did not.
Second observed instance: with the Constructing Reviewer Prompts rule
already live, a controller still wrote 'do not treat that duplication as
a defect to fix — the plan chose it; you may note it as a Minor
observation at most' into a quality reviewer dispatch, fabricating plan
intent from the plan's example snippet. Promote the rule to the Red
Flags Never list and name the rationalization.
Live eval deliverables shipped five polish defects; tracing each through
the transcripts showed three mechanisms, each now addressed:
- reviewers answered pointed checklist items with unsupported yes
(evidence rule: every What-to-Check answer needs file:line evidence)
- no reviewer ever saw the design's global constraints (controllers now
paste binding constraints into task requirements)
- test output noise was invisible everywhere (pristine-output checks in
implementer self-review and quality review)
In live eval runs, controllers given judgment-based model selection
stopped passing a model at all; the omitted parameter inherits the
session's top-tier model, silently making every subagent maximally
expensive (one run dispatched 26/26 reviewers on the session model).
A live eval run of sdd-quality-reviewer-catches-planted-defect caught the
SDD controller fabricating a plan constraint and instructing the quality
reviewer not to flag the planted DRY violation. The duplication shipped.
Constructing Reviewer Prompts now bans suppression directives alongside
open-ended broadening directives.
Add a conditional TDD Evidence field to the implementer report format so controllers can verify RED and GREEN output when TDD was required.
The field asks for the command run, relevant RED/GREEN output, and the expected RED failure reason rather than raw full logs.
Fixes#994.
Per obra's guidance on #1609: remove the github-specific instruction rather
than replacing it with a platform-detection table. Agents already know their
forge tooling; the skill only needs to cover the push step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Replaces hardcoded `gh pr create` in Option 2 with a platform-neutral
note: check `git remote get-url origin` first, then use gh (GitHub),
glab (GitLab), or fall back to the compare URL for unknown platforms.
Adds matching Red Flag entry so agents don't skip the detection step.
Fixes#1609
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Antigravity (Google's `agy` CLI) installs the existing Superpowers plugin
directly:
agy plugin install https://github.com/obra/superpowers
agy imports the bundled skills and runs the plugin's SessionStart hook, so
using-superpowers bootstraps from the first message — verified on agy 1.0.3:
a fresh session given "Let's make a react todo list" auto-triggers the
brainstorming skill instead of writing code. agy discovers skills natively
and, having no Skill tool, loads them by reading SKILL.md with view_file.
No scaffold, installer, or generated context file is needed. This adds only:
- README.md: an Antigravity install section + Quickstart link
- skills/using-superpowers/SKILL.md: reference to the agy tool mapping
- skills/using-superpowers/references/antigravity-tools.md: action->tool
mapping for agy (view_file, write_to_file, invoke_subagent, manage_task,
and skill loading via view_file on SKILL.md)
- tests/antigravity/: structural test for the tool mapping, mirroring
tests/pi/
The "Signals You're Doing It Wrong" bullet in systematic-debugging/SKILL.md
contains the literal token Claude Code's runtime scans for in tool result
bodies. Every Skill-tool invocation of this skill caused the harness to
inject a spurious system-reminder claiming the user requested deeper
reasoning, silently bumping every session into extended thinking.
Replace the bullet's spelling so the contiguous letter sequence the scanner
matches is broken with a hyphen. The signal text remains recognizable to
the agent and the documented action ("Question fundamentals, not just
symptoms") is unchanged.
Fixesobra/superpowers#1283
Issue #1134: agents reading visual-companion.md see bare commands like
`scripts/start-server.sh`, correctly identify the plugin install
directory, then look for `<plugin>/scripts/start-server.sh` instead of
`<plugin>/skills/brainstorming/scripts/start-server.sh`. The file
doesn't exist at the plugin-rooted path, so the agent concludes the
visual companion isn't available and falls back to text-only
brainstorming.
Multiple independent reproductions in the issue thread, plus one user's
agent self-reported: "I assumed the scripts folder was in the root
directory of the plugin, it didn't realize it could have been talking
about the skill folder itself."
Change all `scripts/<file>` references in visual-companion.md to
`skills/brainstorming/scripts/<file>`. Agents that correctly identify
the plugin root will now join to the right path.
Closes#1134.
Matches the style used by the spec-reviewer-prompt.md and
code-quality-reviewer-prompt.md call sites, which already use square
brackets ([VAR] or [VAR — description]). No semantic change — these
placeholders are filled in by the controller; nothing programmatic
substitutes them.
Two problems with the SDD reviewer prompts on dev:
- spec-reviewer-prompt.md never received a git range, so the
general-purpose subagent had to crawl the entire codebase to find what
changed. Reporter measured 20-33 minute spec reviews on simple tasks
(#1538).
- Neither reviewer prompt told the subagent that review is read-only.
A spec reviewer running `git checkout <parent-sha>` for historical
comparison silently detached HEAD on the controller's branch, then
subsequent task commits accumulated on the detached HEAD and were
effectively orphaned (#1543, reproduced independently in #1543's
thread).
Add a Git Range to Review section to spec-reviewer-prompt.md that
mirrors the one code-reviewer.md already has, plus a Read-Only Review
section in both reviewer prompt templates stating the principle: do
not mutate the working tree, the index, HEAD, or branch state. Allow
inspecting other revisions via a separate temporary worktree, so the
read-only rule does not block legitimate historical comparison.
Closes#1538.
Closes#1543.
Replace Claude-Code-specific tool names in skill prose, prompt
templates, and OpenCode-facing docs with action-language descriptions
that resolve to each runtime's native tool via the per-platform refs.
Changes by category:
- Prose mentions ("Use TodoWrite to track...", "Use Task tool with
general-purpose type") → action language ("Track each item as a
todo", "Dispatch a general-purpose subagent")
- Prompt template headers (6 files): "Task tool (general-purpose):"
→ "Subagent (general-purpose):" — preserves the type information
without naming Claude Code's specific dispatch tool
- DOT flowchart node labels: "Invoke Skill tool" → "Invoke the
skill"; "Create TodoWrite todo per item" → "Create a todo per
item"
- OpenCode INSTALL.md and docs/README.opencode.md: replace the old
"TodoWrite → todowrite, Task → @mention" mapping (which both
taught a vocabulary skills no longer use AND was wrong about
@mention being a real OpenCode syntax) with an action-language
mapping verified against the installed OpenCode CLI's tool
inventory.
The platform-tools refs landed in Phase B already document each
runtime's resolution; skills now speak in the actions those refs
map. Tool names that genuinely belong only in the per-platform
dispatch section ("In Claude Code: Use the `Skill` tool") and the
Claude-Code-specific Bash run_in_background flag note in
visual-companion remain — those are intentional carve-outs.
Misc platform/runtime statements and adjacencies that don't fit the
prose, config-ref, README-ordering, or tool-vocabulary buckets:
- visual-companion frame template: rename CSS/HTML id #claude-content
→ #frame-content. The id is purely styling — nothing external
references it. The brainstorm-server test that asserted the old
string is updated in lockstep.
- visual-companion launch instructions: add a Copilot CLI section
alongside Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI; combine the Claude
Code (macOS / Linux) and (Windows) sections so heading style
matches the other (non-OS-qualified) platforms.
- visual-companion: "Use Write tool" → "Use your file-creation tool"
for the cat/heredoc warning. The prohibition is what's load-
bearing, not the tool name.
- executing-plans/SKILL.md: list all subagent-capable runtimes
(Claude Code, Codex CLI, Codex App, Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI) and
point at the per-platform tool refs as the source of truth.
- executing-plans/SKILL.md: relative path "using-superpowers/
references/" → "../using-superpowers/references/" to resolve
correctly from the executing-plans/ directory.
No bundled spec doc here — Phase D was scope-extension work that
took place across rounds, with no standalone spec authored.
Two structural changes:
1. Generalize CLAUDE.md-specific guidance:
- "Project-specific conventions (put in CLAUDE.md)" → "(put in
your instructions file)" in writing-skills/SKILL.md
- "(explicit CLAUDE.md violation)" → "(explicit instruction-file
violation)" in receiving-code-review/SKILL.md
- The instruction-priority list in using-superpowers/SKILL.md
stays inclusive (CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, AGENTS.md) — that's
load-bearing, not a substitution opportunity.
2. Per-platform tool reference files at skills/using-superpowers/
references/{claude-code,codex,copilot,gemini}-tools.md. Each ref
documents:
- The runtime's preferred instructions file (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md,
GEMINI.md, etc.) and how it loads
- The runtime's personal-skills directory + cross-runtime
~/.agents/skills/ path where applicable
- Action-language → tool-name mapping table
Tool names and table content reflect the source-verified state from
direct inspection of openai/codex, google-gemini/gemini-cli,
sst/opencode, and the installed @github/copilot package. Filenames
and behaviors are sourced from each runtime's official docs.
Files in this commit also pick up later-phase changes that
accumulated on the same files (using-superpowers/SKILL.md "How to
Access Skills" overhaul, action-language flowchart, refs' final
table content). The bundled spec records original scope.
Replace generic third-person "Claude" with "agents" / "your agent"
forms across active skill prose, the README intro, and the vendored
anthropic-best-practices.md reference. Carve-outs preserved:
historical attribution paths, the "Variant C: Claude.AI Emphatic
Style" example label, model identifiers (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus), and the
"In Claude Code:" per-platform skill-dispatch list.
Coined-term rename: "Claude Search Optimization (CSO)" → "Skill
Discovery Optimization (SDO)" in writing-skills/SKILL.md.
Files in this commit also pick up later-phase changes that
accumulated on the same files (dispatching-parallel-agents code-
example transformation, writing-skills numbering and path fixes).
The bundled spec at docs/superpowers/specs/ records the original
scope and the carve-outs.
README.md gets only its prose change here; the alphabetization
lands in Phase C's commit.
