That was my impression of superpowers as well. Maybe not highly overengineered but definitely somewhat. I ended up stripping it back to get something useful. Kept maybe 30%.
There's a kernel of a good idea in there but I feel it's something that we're all gradually aligning on independently, these shared systems are just fancy versions of a "standard agentic workflow".
Another great technique is to use one of these structures in a repo, then task your AI with overhauling the framework using best practices for whatever your target project is. It works great for creative writing, humanizing, songwriting, technical/scientific domains, and so on. In conjunction with agents, these are excellent to have.
I think they're going to be a temporary thing - a hack that boosts utility for a few model releases until there's sufficient successful use cases in the training data that models can just do this sort of thing really well without all the extra prompting.
These are fun to use.
I doubt any hot off the press features are *that* important, but am curious if the customizations of the fork are a net positive considering this.
My findings:
1. The spec created by Superpowers was very detailed (described the specific fonts, color palette), included the exact content of config files, commit messages etc. But it missed a lot of things like analytics, RSS feed etc.
2. Superpowers wrote the spec and plan as two separate documents which was better than the collaborative method, which put both into one document.
3. Superpowers recommended an in-place migration of the blog whereas the collaborative spec suggested a parallel branch so that Hugo and Astro can co-exist until everything is stable.
And a few more difference written in [0].
In general, I liked the aspect of developing the spec through discussion rather than one-shotting it, it let me add things to the spec as I remember them. It felt like a more iterative discovery process vs. you need to get everything right the first time. That might just be a personal preference though.
At the end of this exercise, I asked Claude to review both specs in detail, it found a few things that both specs missed (SEO, rollback plan etc.) and made a final spec that consolidates everything.
Superpowers and gsd are claude code plugins (providing skills)
Get Shit Done is best when when you're an influencer and need to create a Potemkin SaaS overnight for tomorrow's TikTok posts.