# superpowers: a Chinese translation of the 307,936-star agent skills framework > Source: > Published: 2026-10-29 12:41:20+00:00 Most coding agents have the same failure mode. You describe a feature, and before you finish the second sentence, the agent is already editing files. No clarifying questions, no spec, no plan. You get code that compiles and solves the wrong problem. `obra/superpowers` exists to interrupt that reflex. It is a software development methodology packaged as a set of composable skills plus bootstrap instructions, written for coding agents. The original repository has 307,936 stars, is primarily Shell, and ships under the MIT license. A Chinese translation was published today: [yangshun2005/superpowers-cn](https://github.com/yangshun2005/superpowers-cn). It has zero stars at the time of writing and no track record. What it does have is a translated README plus a short Chinese quick-start guide that the original doesn't include. The core behavior is a forced pause. When the agent detects you're building something, it does not start writing code. It steps back and asks what you're really trying to accomplish. From that conversation it produces a spec, presented in chunks small enough to actually read and digest. After you confirm the design, it writes an implementation plan — detailed enough, in the project's own framing, for an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste, no judgment, no context on the project, and a dislike of tests to follow. The plan emphasizes real red/green TDD, YAGNI, and DRY. Then, on your go-ahead, it runs a subagent-driven development loop: the agent works through each engineering task one at a time, checks and reviews the work, then moves on. The project claims agents can often work autonomously for hours without drifting from the plan. Skills trigger automatically. There is no special command to invoke them; the premise is that your agent simply has these capabilities once installed. The translation date listed in the repo is 2026-10-29. The structure is deliberately split in two: `README_en.md` kept alongside for reference. That split matters. Translated READMEs often bury the practical part — install commands, harness differences, update procedures — under a long conceptual preamble. Here the practical part comes first and is marked as an addition, so you can tell what's original and what's editorial. The maintainer asks for issues or PRs where the translation is inaccurate. That's the right posture for a translation of a fast-moving project: the English source will drift, and the Chinese copy will need to follow. Superpowers installs differently depending on your harness. If you use more than one, you install it separately for each. The original says this explicitly, and it's the first thing people get wrong. For Claude Code, via the official Anthropic plugin marketplace: ``` /plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official ``` Or register the Superpowers marketplace first, then install from it: ``` /plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace /plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace ``` After that, start your coding agent normally. Skills fire on their own. The README lists per-harness instructions for Antigravity, Codex App, Codex CLI, Cursor, Devin CLI, Factory Droid, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Grok Build CLI, Kimi Code, OpenCode, Pi, Qwen Code, Hermes Agent, and Muse. Do not copy a command from one harness into another; several use entirely different mechanisms, some going through a plugin marketplace and others installing from the repository. The Chinese quick-start collects these, and they're the ones that cost people time: `devin plugins update superpowers` and `gemini extensions update superpowers`. Antigravity updates by re-running the same install command. For the rest, the original doesn't specify. On requirements, the original is silent about operating system, hardware, and version. The only hard dependency is a supported harness. `package.json` lists the project version as 7.0.1. The barrier here isn't the English language in the abstract. It's that this project's value is concentrated in behavioral nuance. "The agent steps back and asks what you're really trying to accomplish" is easy to translate. The reasoning behind it — why the spec is chunked, why the plan is written for a specific caricature of a junior engineer, why subagents review each other — is where readers decide whether to trust the methodology. Chinese-speaking developers are a large share of the audience for coding agents, and the harness list already includes Qwen Code and Kimi Code. A translated README with a practical entry point lowers the cost of evaluating the project from "read a long English document and hope the install section makes sense" to "run two commands and see what happens." That's the honest value proposition. Not that the translation is better than the original, but that it removes a step between curiosity and a working install. Don't judge Superpowers by whether the agent writes code faster. Judge it by whether the agent asks better questions before writing anything. A small experiment: give your agent a feature request with a deliberate ambiguity in it — an unstated constraint, an unclear scope boundary. Run it once without Superpowers and once with. Watch whether the second run surfaces the ambiguity or silently picks an interpretation. My sample here is one project, so this may not hold for you, but the difference tends to be visible on the first try. If the agent does pause and ask, the methodology is doing its job. If it doesn't, check that the skills actually loaded for your harness — the per-harness install requirement is the usual culprit. *Chinese documentation: [https://github.com/yangshun2005/superpowers-cn](https://github.com/yangshun2005/superpowers-cn)* *I'm an independent enterprise AI delivery consultant — private LLM deployment, RAG, agent workflows, AIOps. If your team is stuck somewhere in that stack, my inbox is open.*