Superlite: A Faster Alternatie to Superpowers

Everyone is pushing Agent Fleets and Swarms, and I'm sure that there are many success stories, but from our internal experiments many devs don't see any speed advantage for complex work. Here's what one of them told us recently: "The speed advantage is offset by the manual refactoring work. The code is 'correct', but it's just not what any of us would have written".

Now one could argue that you could just ignore the code if it's working (that is in fact what Ex Co instructed us to do) and just keep running these fleets if the end result "works", but I'm not fully convinced this will end well in the long term.

Then again, I'm stuck with decades of legacy code and systems that noone understands that were introduced by humans...

I have found most of the other skills to emulate an 'enterprisy' way of developing, having everything checked multiple time by 'councils' and whatnot, making things slow, vacuum tokens like mad and the whole process reeks of cargo culting.

The last straw was two weeks ago when I discovered on a run Fable accounted for this problem in by first writing all the code in a scratch git repo and running unit tests, before copying that code into the plan. Since then I’ve been back to vibing. I lose overnight runs but gain sanity.

The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.

If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.

I am not so convinced yet that subagents with haiku and sonnet really deliver better results versus opus, nor if the speed really matters that much if you are truly autonomous. I mean he is talking about saving like 20 minutes here. There are 24 hours a day, you are much more likely to be gated by product specs and knowing what you want and good ideas than engineering if you are hammering things now.

Why not just tell Claude to figure it out and build what it needs? Why do I need a plugin or a factory or whatever.

I just ask “can you go faster?” And claude suggests some stuff and mostly just works autonomously.

Basic issue is this:

1. The models are probabilistic in their output. This is objectively verifiable fact. Give same prompt, repeat and you'll get different output.

2. With these markdown heavy approaches, the system has to keep a track of the system state not just in code but in tons of markdown files as well.

3. As the system evolves due to features, bug fixes, the corresponding markdown files are to be updated as well to keep in sync.

4. This update consumes tokens for sure so now token spend goes through roof.

5. But because the models are probabilistic, the real problem is that it is guaranteed that some of the places would not be updated or updated with misinformation in those markdown files.

6. Next agent run when loading the context from these markdown files would have misinformation in its context that it would discover mid task, would have to rectify the situation. token spend would be quadrupled.

7. Only those edge cases of markdown files would hit that has been visited so there would be many inconsistencies still and they would pile up and compound with the passage of time.

8. Anyone who has significant experience with such approaches would testify to that.

9. There's no solution to that other than just using agents as power tools and holding the context and desired outcome in your own head.

I get this sense that because models are great, the work gets done, and the results are perceived as good enough by the user, then it creates this illusion that the tooling is responsible for it.

I feel like it's kinda like saying "if it wasn't for VS Code then my API wouldn't be this good" which is a very strange correlation to put out there.

I see this tendency on measuring workflows and productivity chasing instead of software, this can create an addictive trap and the illusion that the workflow beats looking at the problem, defining it, and optimizing for how it needs to change.

One thing I learned working across several industries and problem domains throughout my life is that there is no "one size fits all" here and most often productivity hacks are not true bottlenecks.

We stopped doing big design up-front for a reason, yet it’s roaring back.

We know the devil is in the implementation details and you can’t anticipate everything before you try to implement it. The implement/discover/adjust approach cycle is the best cycle for a reason.

The approach of handing plans down to dumber agents is also a bad idea, for the same reason. A dumber agent will plow right through unanticipated friction in the implementation, and it won’t know to stop and raise an issue.

Even smarter agents will try to complete a plan as written without altering course.

Nothing beats implementing quickly, reviewing, addressing, then reviewing again.

If you’re on a sub, you can afford to waste tokens on this planning theater, I suppose.

When I saw the title Superlite, I thought it's a Superpowers fork optimised for less token usage...

Even when starting Claude in dangerous mode, you still need to babysit it! Annoying.

Fast is easy.

Fast and good, not so much.