Superpowers vs Matt Pocock's skills for AI coding agents

Choose Superpowers if you want your coding agent to follow a complete method on its own, from brainstorming a design through plans, test-driven development and code review to a finished branch, in any of 15 agents. Choose Matt Pocock's skills if you want small skills you call when you need them and are free to edit, with grill-me as the entry point. Both collections are MIT-licensed. We compared 5 of their skills and the two collections on philosophy, size, install route, agents and overlap; facts checked on 2026-10-01.

Brainstorming (Superpowers): a design before any code

Brainstorming is the Superpowers skill that runs before any creative coding work, for people whose agent starts building before it understands the request. Its strength is a hard gate: the agent first works out the intended outcome, who it is for and what success looks like, writes that back to you with your words kept apart from its assumptions, and may not write product code, scaffold or install dependencies until you approve a design. Small work gets a short design in the chat, larger work a written spec. Its limit is that it fires on its own: installed as the full plugin, a session-start hook makes the agent reach for it whenever you start building something, which suits a method but can feel heavy for a one-line change. The folder was last changed on 2026-09-19, and obra/superpowers had 293,703 GitHub stars on 2026-10-01. Details: Brainstorming on CookiesForAI.

Writing Plans (Superpowers): from spec to tasks

Writing Plans is the Superpowers skill that turns an approved spec into an implementation plan, for people who hand work to subagents or to another session. Its strength is precision: the plan is written for an engineer who has never seen the codebase, so every task names its exact files, the interfaces it consumes and produces, and small checkbox steps that start with a failing test, and the agent checks the plan against the spec for requirements with no task before handing it over. It then asks how to run the plan, with a fresh subagent per task or in the same session. Its limit is length and coupling: plans are detailed by design, and the skill hands off to sibling skills such as Subagent-Driven Development and Using Git Worktrees, which you only have with the full plugin. The folder was last changed on 2026-09-25. Details: Writing Plans on CookiesForAI.

Test-Driven Development (Superpowers): strict test-first

Test-Driven Development is the Superpowers skill that loads whenever the agent implements a feature or bug fix, for teams whose agent writes tests late or not at all. Its strength is that it allows no wiggle room: no production code without a failing test first, and code written before its test is deleted, not kept as a reference. Each change runs red, green, refactor, the agent watches every new test fail for the expected reason, and it runs the whole suite, not just the new file. A bundled guide covers tests that assert on real behavior rather than mocks, and the skill answers common excuses such as "too simple to test". Its limit is rigidity: throwaway prototypes, generated code and configuration need your permission to skip the rule, which some teams will find slow. The folder was last changed on 2026-09-19. Details: Test-Driven Development on CookiesForAI.

Grill me (Matt Pocock): an interview you start

Grill me is the skill Matt Pocock's README calls his most popular, for anyone who wants an agent to find the holes in a plan before work starts. Its strength is the interview format, which lives in its companion skill, grilling: the agent maps your plan as a tree of decisions, asks every question it can already ask in numbered rounds with its own recommended answer under each, looks up facts in the project itself instead of asking you, and stops only when no branch is open and you confirm a shared understanding. Its limit is that it is a one-line entry point: it runs only when you call it, for example /grill-me, and hands off to grilling through a call to the Skill tool, so agents without one need grilling installed beside it. The folder was last changed on 2026-08-15, and mattpocock/skills had 273,468 GitHub stars on 2026-10-01. Details: Grill me on CookiesForAI.

TDD (Matt Pocock): test-first at agreed seams

TDD is Matt Pocock's test-driven development skill, for developers who want tests that survive refactoring. Its strength is the agreement up front: before any test, the agent lists the seams it plans to test, meaning the public boundaries where behavior can be observed, and asks you to confirm them; no test goes in at an unconfirmed seam. It then works in vertical slices, one test and one minimal implementation at a time, and names three anti-patterns: tests coupled to implementation, tautological tests that recompute the expected value the way the code does, and writing all tests before any code. Mocks are kept to system boundaries such as external APIs, time and randomness. Its limit, compared with Superpowers, is that it does not forbid keeping code written before its test, and refactoring sits outside the loop, in a separate review step. The folder was last changed on 2026-09-17. Details: TDD on CookiesForAI.

The two collections side by side

Philosophy: a method versus a toolbox

Superpowers calls itself a complete software development method. Its README describes a fixed path: brainstorm a design, set up a worktree, write a plan, run it with subagents and reviews, use test-driven development throughout, and finish the branch, with the agent able to work alone "for a couple hours at a time". Its rules are written as mandatory, not as suggestions, and the maintainers say they do not generally accept new skills from contributors.

Matt Pocock's README takes the opposite stance. It names process-owning approaches such as GSD, BMAD and Spec-Kit as taking control away, and describes his skills as small, easy to adapt and composable, to be changed and made your own. The skills are grouped around failure modes he sees in coding agents: misalignment (grill-me, grill-with-docs), verbosity (a shared project glossary), broken code (tdd, diagnosing-bugs) and growing complexity (improve-codebase-architecture).

Overlap: where both cover the same job

Both collections cover the same core jobs, so installing both mostly gives your agent two answers to one question:

• Aligning before code: Superpowers' Brainstorming versus grill-me and grill-with-docs.
• Planning: Writing Plans versus to-spec and to-tickets.
• Testing: two TDD skills with different rules, shown above.
• Debugging: Systematic Debugging versus diagnosing-bugs.
• Review: Requesting Code Review versus code-review.
• Running a plan with subagents: Subagent-Driven Development versus implement-spec.

One difference in practice: Superpowers' optional visual companion in Brainstorming loads a logo from Prime Radiant's website that reports the Superpowers version, which you can switch off with an environment variable. Matt Pocock's README mentions no telemetry; it promotes a newsletter.

How we compared

We read both READMEs and the SKILL.md files of Brainstorming, Writing Plans, Test-Driven Development and Systematic Debugging from obra/superpowers, and of tdd, grill-me and grilling from mattpocock/skills, on GitHub on 2026-10-01. Skill counts come from the repositories' folder listings that day; stars and last-change dates come from our item pages and the GitHub API. Criteria: how each collection thinks about the developer's control, how skills are triggered, how they install and update, which agents the authors document, and where the two overlap. We did not run either collection on a real project or measure code quality, speed or token use.

How to choose

• If you want the agent to follow one method from idea to merged branch without being asked, install Superpowers as a plugin in your agent.
• If you want to stay in control and call a skill only when you need it, start with Matt Pocock's grill-me and tdd through the skills CLI.
• If you plan to edit the skills to fit your team, Matt Pocock's skills CLI route copies them as ordinary files you own.
• If you use one of Superpowers' less common agents, such as Devin CLI, Factory Droid, Pi or Hermes Agent, Superpowers documents its install there; Matt Pocock's skills rely on the skills CLI.
• If you mix the two, keep one TDD skill and one planning skill, so the agent does not get conflicting rules.