obra

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, modifying behavior, or planning anything new, in software or out of it (a talk, a business, a renovation).

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes

Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code

Use when starting any conversation - establishes how to find and use skills, requiring skill invocation before ANY response including clarifying questions

Use when completing tasks, implementing major features, or before merging to verify work meets requirements

Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code

Use when about to claim work is complete, fixed, or passing, before committing or creating PRs - requires running verification commands and confirming output before making any success claims; evidence before assertions always

Use when executing an implementation plan in the current session as the implementer yourself — your human partner chose inline execution, or no subagent tool is available

Use when executing implementation plans with independent tasks in the current session

Use when receiving code review feedback, before implementing suggestions, especially if feedback seems unclear or technically questionable - requires technical rigor and verification, not performative agreement or blind implementation

Use when facing 2+ independent tasks that can be worked on without shared state or sequential dependencies

Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment

Use when starting feature work that needs isolation from current workspace or before executing implementation plans - ensures an isolated workspace exists via native tools or git worktree fallback

Use when implementation is complete, all tests pass, and you need to decide how to integrate the work

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.

You MUST invoke this skill before saying "I don't know," guessing, or treating any topic as new, no matter how trivial the question seems. It supplements other memory systems, which only hold partial records. Searching past conversations is the only way to recover what was actually said.

Apply Strunk's timeless writing rules to ANY prose humans will read—documentation, commit messages, error messages, explanations, reports, or UI text. Makes your writing clearer, stronger, and more professional.

Skills wiki intro - mandatory workflows, search tool, brainstorming triggers

Use when auditing a codebase for semantic duplication - functions that do the same thing but have different names or implementations. Especially useful for LLM-generated codebases where new functions are often created rather than reusing existing ones.

Force unrelated concepts together to discover emergent properties - "What if we treated X like Y?"

Interactive idea refinement using Socratic method to develop fully-formed designs

Write the test first, watch it fail, write minimal code to pass

Four-phase debugging framework that ensures root cause investigation before attempting fixes. Never jump to solutions.

Systematically trace bugs backward through call stack to find original trigger

Run verification commands and confirm output before claiming success

Create detailed implementation plans with bite-sized tasks for engineers with zero codebase context

Never test mock behavior. Never add test-only methods to production classes. Understand dependencies before mocking.

Execute implementation plan by dispatching fresh subagent for each task, with code review between tasks

Execute detailed plans in batches with review checkpoints

Dispatch to the right problem-solving technique based on how you're stuck

Receive and act on code review feedback with technical rigor, not performative agreement or blind implementation

RED-GREEN-REFACTOR for process documentation - baseline without skill, write addressing failures, iterate closing loopholes

Dispatch code-reviewer subagent to review implementation against plan or requirements before proceeding

Find one insight that eliminates multiple components - "if this is true, we don't need X, Y, or Z"

Create isolated git worktrees with smart directory selection and safety verification

Flip core assumptions to reveal hidden constraints and alternative approaches - "what if the opposite were true?"

Understand how ideas evolved over time to find old solutions for new problems and avoid repeating past failures

Spot patterns appearing in 3+ domains to find universal principles

Validate at every layer data passes through to make bugs impossible

Use multiple Claude agents to investigate and fix independent problems concurrently

Complete feature development with structured options for merge, PR, or cleanup

Search previous Claude Code conversations for facts, patterns, decisions, and context using semantic or text search

TDD for process documentation - test with subagents before writing, iterate until bulletproof

Test at extremes (1000x bigger/smaller, instant/year-long) to expose fundamental truths hidden at normal scales

Replace arbitrary timeouts with condition polling for reliable async tests

Use when you need to run interactive CLI tools (vim, git rebase -i, Python REPL, etc.) that require real-time input/output - provides tmux-based approach for controlling interactive sessions through detached sessions and send-keys

Recognize when disagreements reveal valuable context, preserve multiple valid approaches instead of forcing premature resolution

Contribute skills back to upstream via branch and PR

Maintain skills wiki health - check links, naming, cross-references, and coverage

Sync local skills repository with upstream changes from obra/superpowers-skills