Superpowers’ brainstorming skill now draws out what you want before anything gets built

Superpowers rewrote its brainstorming skill from scratch, and Jesse Vincent merged it on October 6. It now asks what you want and why, and decides how much paperwork the job needs afterwards.

In the project's tests, every opening from the old skill began with 40 to 80 words about specs and plans, even for a bakery. Every non-trivial one was a lettered menu.

Those menus steered people. Planning a talk after layoffs, a simulated person picked excitement and alignment, when the real goal was rebuilding trust. The old skill offered 16 to 27 options per conversation. The rewrite offers one at most.

The new first message says you can skip the questions, then asks one open question about a real moment, like when you last wished this thing existed. A menu appears only when you're stuck.

Once it understands one part, the skill describes it back in about 200 to 300 words, then returns to questions. In six test runs that came by the sixth turn, with the agent's guesses labeled as guesses.

Sizing now comes last. It's a quick task, a small change agreed in chat, or a project with a written design. Asked to make an app icon cornflower blue, the old skill wrote a design every time. The new one changed the colour.

For a project, the spec reviewer is gone. A fresh subagent reads the design as its builder and lists what it would still need to ask. You get one round of those questions, most important first.

The approval gate stays. Writing code, scaffolding and installing dependencies all wait until you approve the full description. If you opt out of the questions at the start, the skill ends and the gate goes with it.

In a blind comparison, six testers each tried both versions without knowing which was which, and all six preferred the new one. The biggest gains were feeling understood and trust.

The rewrite is on the dev branch, so the latest release still ships the old skill. It was tested only in Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5. The details are in pull request 2463 in the superpowers repository.