Superpowers to turn Claude Code into a real senior developer

Oct 15, 2025

Imagine you’re working on a complex project. Your AI assistant generates code quickly, but inconsistently: sometimes it skips tests, other times it implements makeshift solutions, and when something fails, it makes random changes hoping they’ll work. Sound familiar? Something tells me you’re not quite understanding each other. The problem, generally speaking, isn’t the AI’s capability, but rather the lack of structure in how it works and the quality of information provided.

In October 2025, AI-assisted software development has evolved far beyond simple code suggestions. Developers leading this transformation don’t just ask their agents for code: they teach them complete methodologies, proven development patterns, and systematic workflows. This is where Superpowers comes in: a skills library that transforms Claude Code into a technical collaborator with professional capabilities.

The problem Superpowers solves

When you work with AI agents without structured guidance, you face several recurring problems:

• Code without tests: The agent implements functionality but forgets to write the tests.
• Ad-hoc solutions: Each problem is solved differently, without following consistent design patterns or standards.
• Chaotic debugging: When faced with an error, the agent tries random changes instead of diagnosing systematically.
• Lack of planning: It jumps into coding without thinking about architecture or implications.

Superpowers solves this by implementing a skills system that activates automatically based on context. When Claude needs to write code, testing skills ensure it follows TDD (Test-Driven Development). When it encounters a bug, debugging skills guide it through a methodical process. When starting a new project, collaboration skills structure the initial brainstorming and planning. It contains more than 20 proven skills and an intelligent discovery system, but let’s look at it in detail.

What exactly is Superpowers?

Superpowers is a plugin for Claude Code that implements techniques, patterns, and tools proven in production. It’s not simply a set of prompts or templates: it’s a complete knowledge transmission system that deeply integrates with our agent’s development lifecycle.

Claude Code startup interface with the Superpowers plugin activated, showing initial skill loading, critical rules, and mandatory workflow to structure AI-assisted development.

The project is structured around four fundamental pillars:

Testing skills: Mandatory TDD

Implements test-driven development (TDD), asynchronous testing, and anti-pattern identification. These skills ensure Claude writes tests before implementation code and rigorously follows the RED/GREEN/REFACTOR cycle. It’s no longer optional: if a testing skill exists for your type of task, its use becomes mandatory and integrates into the process.

Execution of the /superpowers:brainstorm command in Claude Code, showing how the system activates the Brainstorming skill to guide the creation of an email validator and read the corresponding skill from the Superpowers repository.

Debugging skills: Method prevails over speculation

Provides systemic debugging, root cause tracing, and thorough verification. Instead of making random changes hoping they’ll work, Claude learns this way to diagnose problems methodically:

1. Reproduce the problem consistently
2. Add instrumentation to collect data
3. Analyze root causes based on evidence
4. Validate hypotheses with tests
5. Implement the solution and verify

Collaboration skills: From chaotic conversations to structured development

Includes structured brainstorming, project planning, code review, and parallel agent coordination. These skills transform chaotic conversations into productive development sessions.

Design screen in Claude Code showing phase 3 of brainstorming with Superpowers, detailing the architecture of an email validator in JavaScript, including main function, regex patterns, and edge cases to cover.

The /brainstorm command, for example, guides an interactive design session where Claude asks specific questions to understand requirements and edge cases before proposing and executing solutions.

Meta skills: Learning to learn

One of the system’s most powerful capabilities is that Claude learns to create, test, and contribute its own skills. This recursion allows the system to evolve and adapt to your specific needs. You can give Claude a technical book and tell it:

Read this, internalize it, and write the new skills you learned

Architecture: An elegant two-tier system

Superpowers’ architecture is simple yet extraordinarily powerful. It implements a two-tier skills system:

• Core Skills: Fundamental skills maintained in the plugin repository. These are the universal techniques that all software development should follow: TDD, systemic debugging, and structured planning.
• Personal Skills: Your personal skills repository in ~/.config/superpowers/skills/. Here you can create skills specific to your domain, your tech stack, or your particular workflows.

The system implements shadowing, which means your personal skills take priority over core skills when paths match. This allows you to customize behaviors without modifying the plugin code.

Intelligent discovery

When Claude starts a session, the SessionStart Hook automatically:

• Sets up your personal skills repository
• Injects core skills context
• Makes all skills searchable via the find-skills command

The find-skills command searches both locations using descriptions. For example, you could search for skills related to async code debugging, and the system will find any skill whose description mentions those concepts.

  find-skills "debugging async code"
   

Gap tracking: Learning from what’s missing

An included feature makes failed searches get logged to ~/.config/superpowers/search-log.jsonl. This creates a structured record of what skills you need but don’t yet exist, including the timestamp, query performed, number of results, and the context in which the search was made. Periodically you can review this log and create skills to fill the most frequent use cases.

Installation, much simpler than you imagine

Superpowers installs directly from Claude Code’s plugin marketplace. It’s the recommended way that ensures compatibility and automatic updates.

Installation process

The process is very simple:

Add the official marketplace to your Claude Code session

  /plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace
   

Install the plugin

  /plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace
   

And that’s it! Make sure to close and reopen your session with Claude. The first time you run these commands, the plugin will automatically perform the complete initial setup:

• Creates the ~/.config/superpowers/ directory as your personal skills repository
• Initializes a git repository for version control of your skills
• Makes core skills searchable alongside your personal skills
• Adds the /brainstorm, /write-plan, and /execute-plan commands to your session
• Offers to create a public GitHub repository to share your skills

  ~/.config/superpowers/
  ├── .git/                   # Git repository
  ├── .gitignore              # Ignores logs and indexes
  ├── README.md               # About your personal superpowers
  ├── skills/                 # Your personal skills
  │   └── your-skill/
  │       └── SKILL.md
  ├── search-log.jsonl        # Failed searches (not tracked)
  └── conversation-index/     # Indexed conversations (not tracked)
   

Verification

To confirm everything works correctly, use the help command and navigate with TAB to the custom-commands tab. You should see the brainstorming, plan creation, and plan execution commands listed. If these commands appear, the installation was successful.

  /help
   

Practical tutorial: Step-by-step TDD development

Let’s build a complete real-world example to see how Superpowers transforms your workflow. We’ll create a robust email validation system following TDD from start to finish.

Step 1: Structured brainstorming

Before writing a single line of code, we use the /brainstorm command to refine the design. Claude will start a guided conversation asking what we want to build. In this case, you would describe that you need a robust email validator that handles edge cases like international addresses, sub-addressing with +, and domain validation.

Claude Code executing Superpowers' Subagent-Driven Development skill, showing initial project setup and a structured task list to validate emails step by step.

Claude will ask specific questions to understand what cases you need to handle: standard emails, emails with subdomains, valid special characters, internationalization, and rejection of invalid syntax.

Afterwards, it will generate a structured plan based on this conversation. If you’re in a git repository, it will automatically create a working branch for the project and switch to that directory. It might ask you about some specific cases or the technologies to use.

Step 2: Write the first test (RED)

With testing skills activated, Claude will automatically follow the RED/GREEN/REFACTOR cycle. It will start by writing the simplest tests for basic email validation:

• A test that verifies standard format emails are accepted
• Tests that reject emails without @ symbol
• Tests that reject emails without domain
• Tests that reject emails without local part

Claude will run these tests and verify that all fail (phase RED), typically with an error indicating the module doesn’t exist yet. This is exactly what we want in the TDD cycle: first we define expected behavior with failing tests.

Step 3: Minimal implementation (GREEN)

Now Claude implements the minimum necessary to make the tests pass. It will create an EmailValidator class with an isValid method that:

• Verifies the email is a non-empty string
• Looks for the @ symbol in the string
• Verifies @ is not at the beginning or end
• Extracts the local part and domain
• Validates both parts have length greater than zero

Execution of automated tests in the terminal for the email validator developed with Claude Code and Superpowers, showing multiple successful validation cases and the final message 'All tests passed'.

Claude will run the tests again and verify that all pass (phase GREEN). This is the minimal functional implementation that satisfies the requirements defined in the tests.

Step 4: Expand with complex cases

Now Claude adds tests for more advanced cases:

• Emails with subdomains
• Emails with sub-addressing using +
• Emails with dots in the local part
• Rejection of consecutive dots
• Rejection of emails starting with dot
• Support for international domains
• Rejection of emails with spaces

These tests will initially fail. It’s time to refactor to handle these more complex cases.

Step 5: Refactoring (REFACTOR)

Claude will improve the implementation in this part to cover the more complex cases:

Validation with RFC 5322 regular expressions: Implements a robust regex that accepts valid characters in emails according to standards

Normalization and limits: Normalizes the email (trim) and validates it doesn’t exceed 320 characters (RFC 5321)

Local part validation: Creates a separate method that verifies:

• Doesn’t start or end with dot
• Doesn’t have consecutive dots
• Doesn’t exceed 64 characters in length

Domain validation: Creates another method that verifies:

• Has at least one dot (except localhost)
• Each domain label doesn’t exceed 63 characters
• There are no empty labels

Claude structures the code in a modular way, separating responsibilities into specific methods for each type of validation.

Step 6: Final verification

Once the iterations are complete, it runs all tests to verify the refactoring was successful, which would confirm the implementation covers both basic and complex cases. Once finished, it will have created the project with its tests, its commits organized in Git, and even an HTML page with a sample form to test our new project.

Web interface of the Email Validator generated with Claude Code and Superpowers, showing a live validation test form and a list of examples of valid and invalid emails.

Creating your own skills

But that’s not all—another one of Superpowers’ most powerful capabilities is adding new personalized skills to Claude Code’s brain.

Anatomy of a skill

Each skill is a SKILL.md file with specific structure that includes:

• Purpose: Brief description of what the skill does and when to use it
• Context: Situations where the skill applies, with specific triggers
• Methodology: Step-by-step process to follow (the skill’s core)
• Anti-patterns: What NOT to do, common mistakes to avoid
• Examples: Concrete examples showing the skill in action
• Verification: How to verify the skill was applied correctly

Practical example: Custom skill for performance profiling

You can create a skill for performance optimization following the standard structure. Claude can help you create the necessary directory and file.

Performance Profiling skill structure:

Purpose: Systematic approach to identify and resolve bottlenecks through measurement, not assumptions.

Context: Apply when users report slow times, high CPU/memory usage, latency exceeds SLAs, or before optimizing any code.

Methodology:

1. Establish baseline: Measure current performance with real data (response time, throughput, resource usage)
2. Instrument code: Add performance markers in suspected bottleneck areas
3. Analyze hotspots: Identify functions/operations consuming most time using flame graphs, prioritizing by frequency × duration
4. Optimize incrementally: Fix ONE bottleneck at a time, measure after each change
5. Validate in production: Deploy with feature flags, compare metrics before vs after

Anti-patterns:

• Premature optimization (optimizing before measuring)
• Relying on intuition without profiling
• Micro-optimizations in insignificant paths
• No baseline to compare against

Examples: Would include an example of the N+1 problem in database queries, showing that optimization achieved going from 2.4s to 180ms for 100 users (13x faster) by consolidating queries.

Verification: Checklist of documented baseline metrics, profiling data, before/after comparison, statistical significance, and production validation.

This skill is now available to Claude. When you work on performance optimization, Claude will discover and apply it automatically.

Tips and best practices

Version control

Your personal superpowers directory is a git repository. Claude can help you make meaningful commits of your skills, create version tags, and sync with the remote repository.

Sharing skills

It can also help you create a public repository on GitHub to share your skills with the community, setting up the remote and doing the initial push.

Synchronization between machines

Since your skills directory is a git repository, you can sync changes between different machines. Claude can manage the commits, push, and pull of updates to keep your skills synchronized across all your development environments.

Conclusion: The future of AI-assisted development

Superpowers and Claude Code allied represent a fundamental shift in how we work with code agents. We’ve talked about it many times—the way we develop software is changing by leaps and bounds, and tools like this prove it. Instead of treating Claude as a sophisticated autocomplete tool, we transform it into a collaborator that understands and applies professional software development methodologies adapted to the project’s unique circumstances, meeting industry standards.

Next steps

To deepen your mastery of Superpowers:

1. Install the plugin and experiment with basic commands
2. Try the complete workflow: /brainstorm → /write-plan → /execute-plan on a real project
3. Analyze the search-log: Review what skills you frequently search for but don’t exist
4. Create your first custom skill: Formalize a methodology you often use
5. Contribute to the project: Share proven skills with the community

The paradigm of the future

The real power of Superpowers isn’t in individual skills but in the underlying concept: agents that learn and apply complete methodologies, not just syntax. It’s no longer just about “coding faster,” but about increasing the quality of our code through systematic adoption of best practices. Superpowers makes those best practices stop being aspirational and become mandatory requirements.

But remember, above all… Happy Building!