Superpowers Updates & Release Notes

writing-plans produces leaner plans, faster. Plans now record the decisions an implementer needs (signatures, test assertions, the spec's values) instead of writing out the code. Some frontier models, including Opus 5.5, could get overzealous during plan writing and, with certain prompting, would sometimes try to implement the entire project while designing the plan. The new skill keeps planning focused on the plan. When we reproduced the original report, the scratch builds went away, and plans took a quarter of the time and about a third of the tokens. Thanks to Harper Reed for the report and session bundle. (#2333)

Writing Plans

• A plan records decisions. It's not a transcript of the code. "What a Step Contains" replaces the "No Placeholders" section. A test step names the test and its assertions. A code step gives the exact signature, the file, and the spec's values, and includes a body only for an algorithm those don't determine. A verification step gives the command and its passing output. A reference to another task goes through that task's Interfaces block. Placeholders are still called out as the opposite failure. (#2333)
• Self-review checks proportion. The plan compares its own length to the spec's. A plan several times longer than the spec is a transcript, and when code blocks dominate, bodies get replaced with signatures and test assertions. (#2333) …

v6.4.0 was never shipped. v6.4.1 is the first release with these changes. It holds back the new proving-it-works-with-a-movie skill, which is getting cleanup and robustness work and will return in a later release.

The new diagnosing-superpowers skill figures out what went wrong in a session. executing-plans is rebuilt as Native execution, a cheaper alternative to subagent-driven development. This release also adds support for three new harnesses: OpenCode 2.0, Muse, and Qwen Code.

New Skills

• diagnosing-superpowers: when a session goes wrong (repeated work, an ignored plan, a skill that didn't fire, a surprising bill), ask your agent to "figure out what went wrong with superpowers in this session." It pins down the problem with you, reads the transcripts on disk, and reports what happened with path:line evidence for every finding. On request it builds a scrubbed bundle or drafts a GitHub issue for your approval, with the cited evidence left intact. Works on the current session or a past one. (#2236, #2287)

Executing Plans

Heads up: executing-plans no longer stops every few tasks to check in with you. It runs the whole plan, then gets one review at the end. …

Harness Support

• Devin CLI: devin plugins install obra/superpowers now works, and skills auto-trigger at session start. (#1995)
• Hermes Agent: install from a git clone; skills register with Hermes' native loader and the bootstrap loads on the first turn. (#1922, #2025)
• Grok Build CLI added to the install docs. (#1919)

Brainstorming

• Ceremony now scales to the task. Requests are classified as spike, bounded, or architectural; small tasks skip the two-document ritual. Every path still stops for your approval before implementation. (#2063)

Subagent-Driven Development

• Controllers no longer stall on plan conflicts. Non-catastrophic conflicts and ambiguities get a recorded ruling and work continues; only destructive or irreversible actions still stop for a human. One donated session had sat blocked for almost nine hours on a question the controller could have decided. (#2077)
• The pre-dispatch conflict scan records its checks in the ledger instead of just asserting the plan is clean. (#2080)
• Small same-shape tasks batch into one dispatch, cutting subagent cost sharply on micro-task plans; batch reviews verify every file in the brief made it into the diff. (#2078)
• Implementers and reviewers may not spawn their own subagents, which was producing duplicate reviews. (#2059)
• Plans carry a Spec: pointer and SDD reads the spec at setup, so plan conflicts get resolved against the design instead of guessed at. (#2086) …

v6.2.0 (2026-07-23)

Subagent-Driven Development

Two structural changes to how SDD tracks progress and closes out review findings, both developed against live eval campaigns.

• The workspace is now plan-scoped. .superpowers/sdd/ had no plan identity and no end-of-life: a follow-up plan in the same working tree could read the previous plan's ledger as its own progress (observed in the wild, with multiple contamination rounds and ad-hoc workarounds). sdd-workspace now requires the plan file and resolves a per-plan directory, .superpowers/sdd/<plan-basename>/; task-brief and review-package write into their plan's directory (review-package gains the plan file as its first argument); the ledger names its plan on its first line; and the workspace is deleted once the final review is clean — git history is the durable record. Baseline evals showed controllers already refused foreign ledgers, but at a cost of 6–13 tool calls of cross-plan git forensics per resume; plan-scoping makes the answer structural instead. (25/25 baseline and GREEN eval runs documented in docs/specs/ and docs/plans/.) …