Superpowers’ brainstorming skill now asks whether you want to pick the platform, or leave it to the agent

Superpowers changed its brainstorming skill on October 9. Before, someone asked for an iOS app and got a web app, because the agent picked the platform without asking. Now it asks first: do you want to pick the platform, language and libraries yourself, or should the agent pick them and tell you what it chose?

Drew asked Codex, running Superpowers 6.4.2, to design an iOS app for managing OCD. Brainstorming never asked about platform. The design was a web app with a home-screen icon. Drew wanted a native app.

In a fresh Codex session, brainstorming talked through the experience for three turns. Then it announced a phone-friendly prototype, and built a web app without ever bringing up platform.

Every project rests on choices like platform, language and libraries. Early on, the agent now asks which of those you want to make, which you're handing over, and what you already have.

Some users have firm views on their stack, and novices want the agent to decide. It talks it through with the first, picks defaults out loud for the second, and builds on an existing project's stack.

A choice the agent makes goes in the design as its call, never as something you agreed to. Filling in defaults used to be a red flag. Now it's fine, if the agent says them out loud.

Brainstorming gets used outside software too. The first draft only covered technology. The merged version says medium, tools, materials and resources, so it applies to a painting or a cake.

In Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5, tested against simulated people, every hobbyist run asked whether they wanted a say, then stated defaults. On an existing Flask app, all three runs named the stack.

On Codex, where Drew's failure happened, the authors don't claim an improvement. Most runs stalled on approval prompts. They report no regression, and hand testing on Codex comes next.

One gap remains. Planning a scaled-up cake, the agent still assumed which pans the baker owned and let the baker correct it. The assumption was said out loud, and silent choices were Drew's failure.

It's on the dev branch, so the latest release, 6.4.2, still has the old wording. The full results are in pull request 2482 in the Superpowers repository.