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.
Install
/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowersThe repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Run /plugin afterwards to pick the plugin that includes this skill.
npx skills add obra/superpowers --skill diagnosing-superpowersgit 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-superpowersPersonal 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.
Details
- Skill name
diagnosing-superpowers- Repository
- obra/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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