FAQ¶
Compatibility¶
Does this work with Codex / Cursor / Cline / [other agent]?¶
The skills are mostly model-agnostic prose, but harness-specific in places.
Single-skill prose ones (the TDD red-green-refactor loop, the triage state
machine, the grilling skills) are largely portable — the content describes a
practice, not a tool surface. Multi-agent ones — most notably
tdd-parallel — reference Claude Code's tool surface
directly (Agent, Monitor, Bash with run_in_background, SendMessage,
TaskStop) because they orchestrate sub-agents and need real primitives, not
abstractions.
The delivery mechanism is also Claude Code: skills surface via
/plugin install and route through Claude Code's slash-command and skill-matching
infrastructure.
To use them outside Claude Code today you'd manually copy the SKILL.md content of the skills you want into your agent's system prompt (losing auto-trigger), and for multi-agent skills, translate the Claude Code tool calls into your harness's equivalents — the orchestration shape carries over; the API doesn't. There's no first-class adapter for other harnesses.
If you maintain another agent harness and want a clean integration, open an issue — we'd take a PR.
Does it work with non-Anthropic models inside Claude Code?¶
Yes. The skills don't assume a specific model. They've been used with Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku family models without modification.
Why is everything namespaced as /zsl:?¶
Claude Code applies the plugin name as a prefix to every skill it owns, so
/zsl:tdd is the plugin's tdd skill specifically. This avoids collisions if
you install another plugin that also defines a tdd skill.
You can drop the zsl: prefix only inside the plugin's own development setup
(e.g. when hacking on the plugin from a local clone). In normal use, type the
full /zsl:<name> form.
Privacy & telemetry¶
Does the plugin phone home?¶
No. See Privacy. The plugin runs entirely inside your local Claude Code session. No telemetry, no analytics, no remote calls to ZunoSmartLabs infrastructure.
Does the docs site track me?¶
No. superpowers.zsl.dev is a static GitHub Pages site with no analytics,
cookies, forms, or sign-ups. GitHub serves the page and may log standard request
metadata under their own infrastructure logging.
Using the plugin¶
Can I use only some skills?¶
Yes. Skills are independent. If you only want the productivity ones
(grill-me, timesheet,
caveman, write-a-skill),
ignore the engineering skills — nothing forces you to run setup-zsl-superpowers.
The engineering skills do depend on each other, though: /zsl:tdd-parallel
expects sub-issues sliced by /zsl:to-issues; /zsl:triage expects the labels
from /zsl:setup-zsl-superpowers. You can use any of them on their own, but the
end-to-end loop assumes the chain.
How do I update?¶
Then restart Claude Code. (/plugin update <name> is not a real command —
/plugin on its own opens the plugin manager UI, and any trailing argument is
ignored. Marketplace update + restart is the actual update path.)
How do I uninstall?¶
The plugin's per-repo config (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md blocks, docs/agents/
files) stays in place — it's just markdown. Delete it by hand if you want it
gone.
Why don't the engineering skills know about my repo?¶
Run /zsl:setup-zsl-superpowers once per repo. The skills read
docs/agents/issue-tracker.md, docs/agents/triage-labels.md, and
docs/agents/ship-style.md to know what tracker, label vocabulary, and ship
style to use. If those files don't exist, the skills bail with a setup hint.
How do I hack on the skills locally?¶
Clone the repo and register the path as a local marketplace:
Then git pull and /plugin marketplace update zsl-superpowers (and restart
Claude Code) whenever you want your changes picked up.
See Contributing for how to add a new skill.
Troubleshooting¶
A skill that should auto-trigger isn't triggering¶
A few things to check:
- The skill might have
disable-model-invocation: true. Those are user-invocable only — call them explicitly with/zsl:<name>. (grill-with-docs,tdd-parallel,setup-zsl-superpowers, andzoom-outare all user-invocable only by design.) - The trigger phrases are listed verbatim on each skill's page (and in its
SKILL.mdfrontmatterdescription:field). If your prompt doesn't match, rephrase or invoke explicitly.
/zsl:tdd-parallel refuses with "ship-style not PR"¶
It's PR-style only. Direct-push repos can't consolidate into a single
integration PR by definition. Either switch the repo to PR-style for the
duration (edit docs/agents/ship-style.md), or run individual /zsl:tdd
sessions in parallel by hand.
Lost a slice worktree, can I recover?¶
Yes — pre-flight 1b in /zsl:tdd-parallel only sweeps
worktrees whose corresponding issue is closed and whose working tree is
clean. Anything open or with uncommitted changes is left in place. Inspect
.worktrees/<num>-<slug>/ directly.
Project / philosophy¶
Why no per-slice PR review?¶
Code review at slice granularity assumes slices are interesting independently of
each other. They aren't — they're vertical slices of one feature, designed to be
cohesive only as a set. The integration PR groups them in wave order with
--no-ff merge commits, so per-slice diffs are still inspectable, just inside
one PR review surface.
Why TDD specifically?¶
Three reasons. (1) The agent has a fast deterministic pass/fail signal it can loop against, which is the bottleneck on bug-finding. (2) The test is written before the agent decides how to implement, so it can't quietly change the spec. (3) Regression tests accumulate as a side effect — the more you ship via this loop, the harder it gets to regress old behaviour.
How is this different from frameworks like aider / Cline / [other]?¶
Those are agent harnesses. ZSL Superpowers is a plugin for an agent harness (Claude Code), shaped as a set of small, opinionated skills you can adopt piecemeal. There's no orchestration framework taking over your repo — each skill is a markdown file you can read, fork, or replace.