Superpowers 7 rewrote Brainstorming. Read it before you update.

THE SIGNAL / 01

Superpowers 7.0.0 shipped on October 10. One commit changed five of its skills that we list. Here’s what each one now does differently.

Last week we said npx skills check installs updates rather than listing them. This is the kind of update that warning was about: a new major version, and one skill in it rewritten from scratch.

• 1. Brainstorming was rebuilt.It used to take everything toward a written design and a spec review. Now it decides how much process the work needs after it understands what you want. A clear request (“make the icon cornflower blue”) gets done straight away. A small change gets agreed in chat. Only a project gets a design document. Its first message offers to skip the questions, then asks one open question. Before anything is built, a fresh subagent reads the design as the person who will build it and lists what they’d still need to ask. It also asks which choices you want to own, like platform, language and libraries. The maintainers added that after a session designed an iOS app, never asked about platform, and built a web app.
• 2. Systematic Debugging and Requesting Code Review changed one example each.The debugging one is in 04. The code-review one is a gotcha for anyone who writes skills: Claude Code replaces $1 in a skill’s body with an argument word, so an awk '{print $1}' in an example broke as soon as the skill was invoked with arguments.
• 3. Executing Plans and Subagent-Driven Development got script fixes.A task whose test passed silently no longer looks unfinished, and the workspace script stopped overwriting a .gitignore your repo committed.

If you rely on Brainstorming’s old behavior, a design document for every feature, the new one won’t give you that by default. Its opening line now reads: “You build what you believe your human partner wants, and that belief is usually thinner than it feels.” Read the release notes, then update.

• Read the release notes →
• View Brainstorming & platform support →

NEW & VETTED / 02

Nothing new passed this week. What’s new is one line on 24 MCP server pages: how you’ll sign in.

Until now our pages only said whether a server needs an API key. That’s the wrong question for a remote server you sign into. Each page now carries an Auth line, taken from the server’s own docs:

• OAuthyou sign in through your browser, and no key goes into your config file. Seven servers, including Notion, Vercel and Supabase.
• OAuth or tokenyou choose. OAuth on your laptop, a token where there is no browser, such as CI. Seventeen servers, including GitHub, Stripe and Sentry.

We only set the line where the maker’s docs say it. Where they don’t, the page says nothing rather than guess.

• Notion →
• Vercel →
• Supabase →
• GitHub →
• Stripe →
• Sentry →

THE PICK / 03

shadcn/ui — shadcn

S-RANK · 125,000+ STARS · 2 CONTRIBUTORS · UPDATED OCTOBER 9, 2026 BY SHADCN

You probably think of this skill as the one that knows the shadcn CLI. As of October 9 it also builds a design system, starting from a DESIGN.md.

Hand it the file and it works through seven steps. It scaffolds an app and picks one of eight styles by geometry, because “the theme gets replaced by the DESIGN.md anyway”. It says which style it picked and why, in one line. It installs every component and maps your tokens onto shadcn’s variables. Then it restyles the components by editing their variants, so control heights change together. Last, it builds a design-system page with contrast-checked color roles, a matrix of every state, and do/don’t pairs, and checks it in a browser.

What made it the pick is how little it lets the agent guess. “Count the component files on disk. Never quote a component count from memory.” If it can’t read your DESIGN.md, it asks you to move the file: “Don’t guess its contents.” It reads the Do’s and Don’ts and Known Gaps sections in full before editing anything, because those are the rules that override its defaults.

The caveat: you don’t call it by name. It loads itself in any project with a components.json. In Claude Code it then runs npx shadcn@latest info --json to read your project. Its frontmatter pre-approves the shadcn CLI, through npx, pnpm dlx or bunx, so in Claude Code those commands run without asking you. That answers check two from Issue 005 (what does it ask you to run?) in the file itself.

$ npx skills add shadcn-ui/ui@shadcn

• View skill & platform support →

DIDN’T PASS / 04

Two things that were wrong in skills you may trust, both fixed in Superpowers 7, and 79 servers on their way out.

• Systematic Debugging’s example printed the secret it was checking for.This was our Issue 005 pick. We missed it when we picked it. One example checked whether a signing identity was set with ${IDENTITY:+SET}${IDENTITY:-UNSET} and env | grep IDENTITY. When it is set, the expression and the grep each print its value, and an agent following the example copies that into your terminal and its transcript. Version 7 reports only whether the variable is set. If your agent has run this skill against real credentials, look at what it printed.
• On Windows, the Superpowers plugin could run a file planted in a repository.Its session-start hook looked up bash and where in the current directory first, so a repo containing a bash.cmd or where.bat got it run when your session started. That applies to the plugin install, which ships hooks, not to the skill folders npx skills add copies. It’s fixed in 7.0.0. If you use the plugin on Windows, update it.
• 79 MCP servers leave the directory tomorrow, October 14.These are the ones that publish no repository and no website, as we said in Issues 004 and 006. Your installed configs keep working, because they point at the server, not at us. Where a product has an official server from its own maker, that server comes back as a new entry once we’ve verified it.

WORKFLOW / 05

Disciplined Development — Brainstorming, test-driven development, Systematic Debugging and verification, all from Superpowers, so the agent plans before it codes and proves its work before it says it’s done. Beginner.

We featured it before. It’s back because its first step changed under it this week. Brainstorming no longer writes a design document for every feature, so the workflow now starts with a conversation sized to the work: a small fix gets done, a project gets a design. Every step after that is unchanged, including the debugging step’s fixed example from 04.

• Disciplined Development →

WHAT CHANGED / 06

62 skills you may have installed were updated this week.

“Updated” means the skill’s own directory got a commit since October 5 — not a judgment about what the commit did. Before you run update, read the commit. Most of the 62 come from four repositories. Five are Superpowers (see 01). Fourteen are Microsoft’s Azure and Foundry skills, all in one commit on October 5. Ten are Corey Haines’s marketing skills, changed between October 6 and 8, and six are .NET skills. Top of the rest by stars:

• Claude APIOctober 9
• shadcn/uiOctober 9
• Agent SkillsOctober 10
• Taste SkillOctober 11
• ImpeccableOctober 12
• Last 30 DaysOctober 11
• Scientific SkillsOctober 12
• Emil Kowalski’s Design SkillsOctober 11

…and 19 more. The date is on every skill’s page, under Last commit.