powers

A thin, personal Claude Code plugin for a disciplined dev workflow: brainstorm → committed spec → test-first implementation in worktrees → adversarial review → hard verify gate.

What's in the box

• brainstorming skill — Socratic refinement of a rough idea into a spec at docs/specs/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md, committed (spec: <slug>) before any code. Adapted from obra/superpowers (MIT).
• tdd skill — failing test first, for features and bug fixes. The Iron Law: no production code without a failing test that demands it.
• systematic-debugging skill — root cause before fixes: one hypothesis at a time, no symptom patches, a three-strikes circuit breaker, then hand off to the tdd bug flow. Adapted from obra/superpowers (MIT).
• implementer agent — one task per dispatch, test-first, in an isolated worktree, commits before finishing. Stops and reports on spec ambiguity.
• code-reviewer agent — read-only (Read/Grep/Glob, haiku), reviews a diff against its spec for correctness, scope creep, and missing tests.
• verify gate — a SubagentStop hook. Blocks a finishing subagent if it changed source without tests (VERIFY_LEVEL=tdd) or if the repo's verify command fails.
• setup skill — /powers:setup rolls a repo out: detects test/build commands, asks for VERIFY_LEVEL, generates CLAUDE.md + verify.sh, commits.
• approve shortcut — /powers:approve after reviewing a brainstormed spec: counts as explicit approval, commits the spec, enters plan mode. User-invoked only.
• ship shortcut — /powers:ship when the branch's work is done: opens the PR, requests + waits for Copilot's review, fixes what's relevant, states why the rest was skipped. User-invoked only.

Install

The repo is its own marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add craftycorvid/powers
/plugin install powers@powers

Per-repo rollout

Run /powers:setup in the repo. It detects the project's test/build commands, asks which VERIFY_LEVEL you want (tdd strict / build relaxed), generates CLAUDE.md and scripts/verify.sh from the templates, runs verify.sh to prove it works, and commits both. It never overwrites existing files — on an already-configured repo it only offers what's missing.

Manual fallback (what setup automates):

1. CLAUDE.md — copy templates/CLAUDE.md.template, fill in invariants, commands, pointers, and the VERIFY_LEVEL= line.
2. scripts/verify.sh — copy templates/verify.sh.template, point it at the repo's real test command. Non-zero exit blocks subagents from finishing. (Without it the gate falls back to auto-detection — package.json test script, Cargo.toml, gradlew — and warns loudly if it finds nothing.) It must be safe to run in a fresh checkout — worktree agents start with no deps installed; see the bootstrap guard in the template.
3. docs/specs/ — created automatically by the first brainstorm.

Overriding per repo

• A repo-local skill at .claude/skills/<name>/ shadows the plugin skill of the same name — copy, edit, done.
• CLAUDE.md instructions beat skill guidance on conflict; it's the repo's constitution. VERIFY_LEVEL=build is the built-in relaxation.
• Uninstall entirely: /plugin uninstall powers@powers.

How is this different from superpowers?

The design rule: lean on Claude Code's native primitives instead of rebuilding them. Deliberately absent, and what covers it instead:

Not built	Native feature that covers it
Worktree management skill	isolation: worktree agent frontmatter
Plan orchestrator / task sequencer	Plan Mode + subagent dispatch
Session-start skill index hook	Skill auto-routing from descriptions
Multi-harness compatibility layer	This runs in Claude Code, period
Review-loop orchestration	One code-reviewer agent; native iteration