Superpowers is a software development methodology for coding agents that guides work from clarifying requirements through design, planning, implementation, testing, and review. It is for developers who want agents to follow a structured, test-focused process using composable skills and subagents.
Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx skills add obra/superpowers --skill writing-plansgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/obra/superpowersWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/obra/superpowers/writing-plans)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obra/superpowers/writing-plans"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obra/superpowers/writing-plans/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/obra/superpowers/writing-plans"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/obra/superpowers/writing-plans.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket pass
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00021 | $0.02313 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00925 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00463 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00231 |
Grade A, and why
writing-plans scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 20d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
Copies of this mod
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 89 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 89 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 207 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 92 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 92 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- writing-plans — 100% identical, 89 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 205 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Writing Plans
Overview
Write implementation plans for an engineer who has not seen this codebase or this spec. Assume they write idiomatic code in the project's language once they know the exact interface and the exact test, and that they will make a reasonable choice wherever the plan leaves one open. What they cannot know is what you decided: which files, which names and signatures, which values from the spec, which tests prove each task. Document those. Give them the whole plan as bite-sized tasks. DRY. YAGNI. TDD. Frequent commits.
Announce at start: "I'm using the writing-plans skill to create the implementation plan."
Context: If working in an isolated worktree, it should have been created via the superpowers:using-git-worktrees skill at execution time.
Save plans to: docs/superpowers/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<feature-name>.md
- (User preferences for plan location override this default)
Scope Check
If the spec covers multiple independent subsystems, it should have been broken into sub-project specs during brainstorming. If it wasn't, suggest breaking this into separate plans — one per subsystem. Each plan should produce working, testable software on its own.
File Structure
Before defining tasks, map out which files will be created or modified and what each one is responsible for. This is where decomposition decisions get locked in.
- Design units with clear boundaries and well-defined interfaces. Each file should have one clear responsibility.
- You reason best about code you can hold in context at once, and your edits are more reliable when files are focused. Prefer smaller, focused files over large ones that do too much.
- Files that change together should live together. Split by responsibility, not by technical layer.
- In existing codebases, follow established patterns. If the codebase uses large files, don't unilaterally restructure - but if a file you're modifying has grown unwieldy, including a split in the plan is reasonable.
What ships with it
1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 20d ago Changed · +12 lines a6c67c190006
- 26d ago Changed · +21 lines 0bc3d36590f7
- 1mo ago First seen · 172 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 48508f44bbfd
writing-plans is a skill published in the GitHub repository obra/superpowers (299,875 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 2,313 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
skill-creator
Create a skill or bring an existing one up to the same standard (validate + asm eval fix loop); run evals, tune triggering. Use when authoring, fixing, or retrofitting a skill. Don't use for invoking skills, writing prose, or Python scaffolds.
skill-index-updater
Add GitHub skill repos to the ASM index: clone, audit, eval, regenerate index, rebuild catalog, open PR. Use when given GitHub URLs to onboard. Don't use for refreshing indexed repos (refresh-index), improving skills (skill-creator), or install.
hello-world
A minimal test skill that greets the user and demonstrates the ASM publish workflow.
typescript
You MUST use this when working on TypeScript-specific problems - compiler errors, tsconfig, strict typing, type inference, generics, complex type definitions, module resolution, ESM/CJS interoperability, type-checking performance, migration, or monorepo configuration. Also applies to designing or refactoring type-safe…
debugging
You MUST use this when investigating bugs, regressions, failing tests, build or integration failures, flaky behavior, performance anomalies, or other unexpected technical behavior.
parallel-agents
You MUST use this when several units of work might run concurrently through agents - independent investigations, specialist reviews, repository analyses, or plan tasks that look unrelated - covering whether they are genuinely independent, which mutable state needs isolation, how wide the wave should be, and how…