Community · by obra

Systematic debugging (Superpowers) Claude skill

The Systematic debugging (Superpowers) skill guides an AI assistant through finding the root cause of bugs and failing tests before any fix is proposed.

MIT licence
★ 301,989 on GitHub (whole repository)
Verified against its source 19 Oct 2026

View SKILL.md Repository

What the Systematic debugging (Superpowers) skill does

The assistant can use it when it runs into a bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, and it should be applied before proposing fixes. It covers reading error messages closely, stating a single hypothesis for the root cause, and building a minimal failing test case. It also says to question the overall architecture after three or more fixes have failed.

What it covers

Questioning architecture after three or more failed fixes

How to install it

In Claude Code

/plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official

This plugin also installs: brainstorming, diagnosing-superpowers, dispatching-parallel-agents, executing-plans, finishing-a-development-branch, receiving-code-review, requesting-code-review, subagent-driven-development, test-driven-development, using-git-worktrees, using-superpowers, verification-before-completion, writing-plans, writing-skills.

What you need

In its documentation's own words:

“If you use more than one, install Superpowers separately for each one”

Steps change between versions. Check the official instructions before you install.