diagnosing-superpowers skillA
diagnosing-superpowers is agent-read markdown (skill) from obra/superpowers: Use when a superpowers session went wrong and your human partner wants to know why — repeated work, ignored plans, stumbles, poor results, a skill that didn't fire, "it took too long", "why is it so expensive", "what is it doing" — or wants to build a bug report for the superpowers maintainers, for the current session or a past one identified by id or path, on any harness..
Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.
What the file says
# Diagnosing Superpowers ## Overview Pin down with your human partner what went wrong in a session, read the transcripts on disk, and report what happened with evidence. You report; you do not diagnose superpowers. Whoever triages the bundle or the issue decides whether superpowers changes. **Core principle:** Every finding cites `path:line`. No citation, no finding. Every number comes from the transcript or from a command you ran, never from memory. ## Workflow Create a todo per step. Steps 5–7 run only on their stated condition. 1. **Problem intake.** Ask one question at a time until you can write a statement naming the session(s), the turn range if known, what your partner expected, what happened, and the observable they care about (wall-clock, tokens, repeated actions, one specific action). "It took too long" is a complaint, not a problem statement. Note whether the goal is a superpowers bug report. 2. **Locate.** Resolve each session to verified absolute filesystem paths using `references/session-discovery.md`. Confirm a past session by quoting its first prompt and timestamp, and list every candidate you rejected with the …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add obra/superpowers/diagnosing-superpowers@git:20260919.5bf4e78mdr add obra/superpowers/diagnosing-superpowers@sha256:5a652f8132cc901ePin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_jayu4rhdmhpzcm5b)
1 badge views in 30 days
Versions
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (6904 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
obra/superpowers · 291,204 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-22 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_jayu4rhdmhpzcm5b GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=obra/superpowers/diagnosing-superpowers GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/5a652f8132cc901eb5ca61f89157839f87a2f20aed037fc7a2b51051bc37cd19
Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
More from obra/superpowers
Every file in obra/superpowers