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Relationship to superpowers

chris-code branched from obra/superpowers v5.1.0 and has since selectively backported mechanisms from v6.0.0 (file handoffs, pre-flight plan review, a durable progress ledger, reviewer-integrity rules). If you know superpowers, you already know most of chris-code: the same brainstorm → plan → execute → review → finish pipeline, most of the same skill names, the same TDD and systematic-debugging discipline. This page covers what changed and why.

Five shifts

  1. Lean artifacts over exhaustive ones. superpowers' plans documented everything "as if the engineer has zero context," with full code in every step — which implementing agents discarded and rewrote. chris-code adopts "contracts stay, choreography goes": specs capture invariants, plans capture what and where, code is written against the real repo.

  2. A real agent layer, dispatched by scope. superpowers is skills-only, dispatching generic subagents steered by prompt templates. chris-code ships 14 dedicated agents that auto-dispatch by file extension and project dependencies — you describe the task, the routing is mechanical.

  3. Review is a uniform, multi-stage gate. superpowers' two-stage review (spec, then quality) is kept and hardened: the reviewers are dedicated scope-dispatched agents, lint becomes its own mandatory gate, a commit-lite idiom check runs pre-commit, and a final full-diff pass catches cross-task drift. A later pass added the assurance hardening — the spec-blind intent re-check, the conformance pair, a mutation gate that proves the tests can detect a change, and honest accounting of what the gates prove.

  4. Parallelism is a feature, not a footgun. superpowers lists parallel implementers as a Red Flag (they collide). chris-code maps each task's file footprint up front, groups non-overlapping tasks into stages, and runs each stage concurrently — safety by scheduling, not prohibition.

  5. Native tools first, with a hard gate. Both prefer native worktree tools. Where superpowers falls back to a manual git worktree when none exists, chris-code stops and warns — a silent fallback once caused real damage.

What stayed the same

brainstorming, test-driven-development, systematic-debugging, finishing-a-development-branch, and the session-start discovery skill carry over essentially unchanged (renames and diagram-format swaps aside). chris-code is a true superset: every superpowers skill is present, plus 11 new skills and a 14-agent layer.

A fuller side-by-side, including the receipts, lives in the repository's superpowers-comparison.md.