Superpowers makes spec-driven work a precondition, then ships it to twelve harnesses

The enforcement mechanism is a prompt. The differentiator, by the dev.to quickstart's own account, is a bootstrap instruction that makes the agent check for relevant skills before it starts any task, so the workflow activates without anyone typing a slash command ^[4]. That is a real improvement on a skill file whose invocation depends on a human remembering it while a deadline closes ^[2]. It is also a guarantee that lives in the context window, and the install notes say so plainly: Hermes Agent has no post-compaction hook, so a long session that compacts over its first turn can lose the bootstrap, and the documented remedy is to start a fresh session ^[11]. Pi approaches the same risk from the other side, with a small extension that injects the `using-superpowers` bootstrap at session start and again after compaction, and which does not need Pi's compatibility Skill tool because Pi supports skills natively ^[10]. One methodology, two different odds of it being in force on turn forty.

Then the portability accounting. Twelve harnesses have manifests ^[5][6], and there is no global install; you install per agent ^[7]. OpenCode counts as a separate path even on a machine where another harness is already set up ^[12], Claude Code has two marketplaces to pick between, Anthropic's official one and obra/superpowers-marketplace ^[8], and Cursor users find it by searching the plugin UI ^[20]. Portability means the methodology survives a tool switch, not that one install covers your desk.

Worth noting from the same install section: Antigravity gets its own note, including that it runs the session-start hook automatically so the skills are live from the first message ^[9], but Antigravity does not appear in the twelve-name manifest list ^[18]. Of the twelve that are listed, three carry harness-specific caveats ^[19]. The supported surface is already moving faster than the list that describes it.

The success signal is conversational. The guide's advice is to ask the agent what skills are available rather than trust a quiet install message, and to look for `brainstorming`, `writing-plans`, `test-driven-development` and `subagent-driven-development` in the reply ^[13]. When a skill is present but never fires, the guide puts the fault in the routing description rather than the model ^[14]. So the debugging surface is prose, and nothing here returns an exit code you could wire into CI.

What the package actually relocates is where the discipline is stored: out of the operator's memory and into the harness startup sequence ^[4]. Seven skills are documented as the basic workflow ^[17], and "write tests first, always" is one of four stated principles the agent is instructed to check ^[15]. That is a better home for the rule than a README, and it is still not a lock.