Diagnosing Superpowers

Use when a superpowers session went wrong and your human partner wants to know why — repeated work, ignored plans, stumbles, poor results, a skill that didn't fire, "it took too long", "why is it so expensive", "what is it doing" — or wants to build a bug report for the superpowers maintainers, for the current session or a past one identified by id or path, on any harness.

309,696 stars 27,549 forksOther Plugin marketplace

Install

Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers

The repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Run /plugin afterwards to pick the plugin that includes this skill.

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)
npx skills add obra/superpowers --skill diagnosing-superpowers
Manual install
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/obra/superpowers.git /tmp/superpowers
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/superpowers/skills/diagnosing-superpowers ~/.claude/skills/diagnosing-superpowers

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

# Diagnosing Superpowers

## Overview

Pin down with your human partner what went wrong in a session, read the
transcripts on disk, and report what happened with evidence. You report;
you do not diagnose superpowers. Whoever triages the bundle or the issue
decides whether superpowers changes.

**Core principle:** Every finding cites `path:line`. No citation, no
finding. Every number comes from the transcript or from a command you ran,
never from memory.

## Workflow

Create a todo per step. Steps 5–7 run only on their stated condition.

1. **Problem intake.** Ask one question at a time until you can write a
   statement naming the session(s), the turn range if known, what your
   partner expected, what happened, and the observable they care about
   (wall-clock, tokens, repeated actions, one specific action). "It took
   too long" is a complaint, not a problem statement. Note whether the
   goal is a superpowers bug report.
2. **Locate.** Resolve each session to verified absolute filesystem paths using
   `references/session-discovery.md`. Confirm a past session by quoting its
   first prompt and timestamp, and list every candidate you rejected with the
   reason, or "none". Enumerate subagent transcripts. Create
   `~/.superpowers/diagnosing-superpowers/<session-id>/`, tell your
   partner the path, and fill `templates/case.md` there, following its
   provenance rules for environment and skill observations.
Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name
diagnosing-superpowers
Path
skills/diagnosing-superpowers/SKILL.md
License
MIT
Repo updated
29 October 2026

FAQ

What does the Diagnosing Superpowers skill do?

Use when a superpowers session went wrong and your human partner wants to know why — repeated work, ignored plans, stumbles, poor results, a skill that didn't fire, "it took too long", "why is it so expensive", "what is it doing" — or wants to build a bug report for the superpowers maintainers, for the current session or a past one identified by id or path, on any harness.

How do I install the Diagnosing Superpowers skill?

Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Diagnosing Superpowers popular?

It lives in obra/superpowers, which has 309,696 GitHub stars and 27,549 forks, and is included in 6 curated skill lists.

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