Writing skills
What separates a skill that changes behaviour from one that is ignored — mostly the description field.
Installation
$ npx skills add obra/superpowersThe CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in obra/superpowers, not writing-skills alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.
Summary
What separates a skill that changes behaviour from one that is ignored — mostly the description field.
- Reach for it when your team wrote skills and the model never triggers them.
- Sits in Working with skills — finding skills, writing your own, and keeping a skill library from turning into a junk drawer.
- Stack-agnostic — nothing in it assumes a particular language or framework.
- Published by Jesse Vincent. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
- Installing pulls the whole obra/superpowers repository: this catalogue lists 13 other entries from it, and the repo may hold more.
Where it sits in delivery
Working with skillsFinding skills, writing your own, and keeping a skill library from turning into a junk drawer.Everything in Meta →
The skill itself
The full text lives with its publisher and changes when they change it. Read it there rather than here — a mirrored copy of somebody else's procedure goes stale silently, and this page would have no way of telling you.
Related
More in Working with skills
- Context engineeringDeliberately curating what the agent sees and when — the single biggest lever on output quality.
addyosmani/agent-skills - Find skillsSearches the registry for a skill that fits what you are doing, and installs it.Agent
vercel-labs/skills - Skill creatorAnthropic's own tool for writing a new skill in the format agents actually load.Agent
anthropics/skills - Using superpowersThe index for the rest of the library — which skill applies when, so the others actually get invoked.
obra/superpowers