Head to head
karpathy-skills vs superpowers
karpathy-skills and superpowers solve the same job (Planning & reasoning), so this is a pick-one decision.
| Field | karpathy-skillsgithub.com Not yet swept | superpowersgithub.com Not yet swept |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A ~65-line CLAUDE.md built around four LLM coding failure modes Karpathy identified. Adds no tools — it changes how the agent decides: surface assumptions before coding, refuse speculative abstraction, keep diffs scoped, define a verifiable stopping condition. ~203k stars. | An agentic skills framework by Jesse Vincent that imposes a full development workflow: a Socratic brainstorming phase before any code is written, enforced RED-GREEN-REFACTOR TDD, subagent-driven parallel execution, systematic debugging and worktree management. ~272k stars. |
| Category | Planning & reasoning | Planning & reasoning |
| Cost tier | free | free |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| Why builders pick it | Cheapest quality win on the entire list. One file, no install, works alongside everything else. 'Surgical Changes' alone stops the drive-by refactors that break a working layout while fixing something unrelated. | The brainstorming phase is the part that matters for a build — it forces the requirements conversation (what is an issue? how does the archive paginate?) before Claude starts generating components you will throw away. |
| Watch out for | not logged | not logged |
| How to wire it up | curl -o CLAUDE.md .../main/CLAUDE.md | /plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official |
| Editor's pick | Yes | Yes |
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