Superpowers

Superpowers is a skills library and software-development methodology for coding agents, built by Jesse Vincent and the team at Prime Radiant. It ships a set of composable, auto-triggering skills — brainstorming, planning, test-driven development, code review — that turn a coding agent into a disciplined collaborator instead of one that jumps straight to writing code.

Thrum's coordination skills are built on top of Superpowers. Several of them — including the brainstorm cycle and project-setup — read inputs that only the Superpowers skills produce. If Superpowers isn't installed, those workflows have nothing to consume and the chain breaks at the first step.

Install Superpowers before running the brainstorm or project-setup pipelines. It is a prerequisite, not an optional add-on, for the full coordination workflow.

Why Thrum needs it

Thrum coordinates who does the work — agents, messages, worktrees, review gates. Superpowers supplies the engineering discipline those agents apply inside each step. Thrum's skills deliberately don't re-implement that discipline; they complement it.

The hand-off chain looks like this:

  1. brainstorming (Superpowers) refines a rough idea into a design document.
  2. writing-plans (Superpowers) turns the approved design into a bite-sized implementation plan with exact file paths and verification steps.
  3. project-setup (Thrum) reads that plan file and fans it out into Beads epics, tasks, dependencies, and per-epic implementer prompts.
  4. Implementers execute under test-driven-development (Superpowers) and respond to review under receiving-code-review (Superpowers).

Skip Superpowers and step 3 has no plan file to read and no design doc to trace against.

How Thrum skills map to Superpowers skills

Thrum skill Builds on (Superpowers)
coordinator-running-brainstorm-cycles brainstorming
project-setup writing-plans (plan input), brainstorming (design)
verify-against-plan writing-plans
implementer-tdd-and-quality test-driven-development
implementer-receiving-review-feedback receiving-code-review
adversarial-critique brainstorming, writing-plans, verification-before-completion
efficient-multi-agent-research dispatching-parallel-agents
orchestrate requesting-code-review / code-review

Installation

Install Superpowers separately for each coding agent you use. Full per-harness instructions live in the Superpowers README.

Claude Code

From Anthropic's official marketplace:

/plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official

Or from the Superpowers marketplace (also carries elements-of-style, episodic-memory, and other related plugins):

/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace
/plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace

Codex (CLI and App)

Superpowers is in the official Codex plugin marketplace. In the Codex CLI, open /plugins, search for superpowers, and select Install Plugin. In the Codex app, open Plugins in the sidebar and click + next to Superpowers.

OpenCode

OpenCode uses its own plugin install. Tell OpenCode:

Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/superpowers/refs/heads/main/.opencode/INSTALL.md

Other harnesses

Superpowers also supports Factory Droid, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot CLI. See the README for the exact command for each.

What's inside

The skills you'll lean on most with Thrum:

  • brainstorming — Socratic design refinement; produces the design doc.
  • writing-plans — detailed, junior-engineer-proof implementation plans.
  • test-driven-development — enforced RED-GREEN-REFACTOR.
  • requesting-code-review / receiving-code-review — the review loop.
  • using-git-worktrees — isolated branches for parallel work.
  • dispatching-parallel-agents — concurrent subagent workflows.
  • verification-before-completion — prove it's actually done.

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