I like to think I have a couple of “superpowers”… but coding agents aren’t (yet) one of them.
That said, I’ve been experimenting with obra/superpowers + Claude, and I have to admit the experience has been surprisingly solid.
It feels much more interactive compared to typical coding agent workflows, and more importantly, it really helps in building and refining the right context for the agent to work effectively.
Still early days, but definitely an interesting direction. Curious to see how this space evolves.
Overall my primary concern when building with coding agents is their context. How do I point them to the right part of the code but also how to teach them my way of developing and doing things. Good for me there is a good amount of open source code and contributions I made over the years so it knows about gianarb already a little bit. Like many people I ask agents questions, I tell them to ask until they feel they have enough context, then I ask their opinions based on what they have in their training model (different LLMs know different things, some are interesting).
Skills like obra/superpowers are in line with my way of working so it is a nice way to try capabilities without having to spend time writing them on my own all together. I am sure some will be replaced at some point by a custom skill but so far so good.
I tried “get shit done” as well but it looked a lot more heavy weight and I did not feel like I need such complexity. I define myself as “pragmatic early adopter”, I want to stay on top but my toolchain is pretty small. I am writing this post from VIM and I still use TMUX like I do since forever.
My approach sounds like it is going in the right direction now that
Claude has a new CLAUDE_CODE_NEW_INIT env var to make CLAUDE.md a bit more dynamic and even
without skills it looks like it is working like that a bit more everyday.
I am still figuring this out like everyone else, but I share what I learn along the way. If any of this is useful to you, come back to shippingbytes.com — I will keep writing as I go.
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