Superpowers Lab — Summary

Superpowers Lab is the experimental incubator for the Superpowers plugin ecosystem, shipping 5 skills that extend Claude Code's capabilities into interactive CLI automation (tmux), on-demand MCP discovery, semantic code deduplication, Slack messaging, and Windows VM management.

Each skill is functional but explicitly labeled as "still being refined and tested" — this is the pre-production proving ground for capabilities that may eventually graduate to the main superpowers plugin or become standalone plugins.

Differs from superpowers (seed): The seed provides the core development methodology (TDD, brainstorming, worktrees, code review). Superpowers Lab adds operational primitives — tool interaction (tmux for interactive CLIs), infrastructure (Windows VM in Docker), communication (Slack messaging), discovery (MCP-CLI), and code quality (semantic duplicate detection) — none of which overlap with seed skills.

Superpowers Lab — Since Superpowers (Seed Delta)

New Skills vs. Seed (14 skills)

Seed skills: brainstorming, writing-plans, executing-plans, subagent-driven-development, dispatching-parallel-agents, test-driven-development, systematic-debugging, verification-before-completion, requesting-code-review, receiving-code-review, using-git-worktrees, finishing-a-development-branch, writing-skills, using-superpowers.

Lab adds 5 entirely new capabilities with no seed overlap:

Key Architectural Difference from Seed

The seed skills enforce a workflow methodology (spec-first, TDD, worktrees). Lab skills extend operational tooling — they give Claude Code abilities to control tools it normally can't interact with directly:

• using-tmux-for-interactive-commands — controls vim, git rebase -i, REPLs, and other interactive tools that block normal automation
• mcp-cli — allows MCP server querying without permanent configuration (ephemeral MCP access)
• windows-vm — enables cross-platform testing from within a macOS/Linux Claude Code session

Version Timeline

• v0.1.0: 2024-11-10 (initial: tmux + mcp-cli)
• v0.2.0: 2025-01-11 (semantic dedup)
• v0.3.0: 2025-01-31 (Slack)
• v0.4.0: 2026-03-23 (Windows VM)

Superpowers Lab — New Primitives

New Skills (5)

using-tmux-for-interactive-commands

Creates detached tmux sessions, sends keystrokes programmatically, captures terminal output. Enables automation of normally-manual interactive workflows: vim, git rebase -i, menuconfig, htop, REPLs, any tool requiring keyboard navigation.

mcp-cli

Uses the mcp CLI tool for on-demand MCP server querying without permanent configuration. Pattern: discover available tools → invoke one-off → no context pollution from pre-loaded integrations. Addresses the "MCP server in settings = always-on context cost" problem.

finding-duplicate-functions

Two-phase semantic deduplication pipeline:

1. Extract function catalog via scripts/extract-functions.sh → catalog.json
2. Categorize by domain using Claude Haiku subagent → categorized.json
3. Split into categories via scripts/prepare-category-analysis.sh → categories/*.json
4. Find semantic duplicates using Claude Opus subagent → duplicates/*.json
5. Generate report via scripts/generate-report.sh → report.md

Multi-model usage: Haiku for categorization (cheap), Opus for semantic analysis (accurate). This is the only skill in the batch that explicitly routes different tasks to different Claude model tiers.

slack-messaging

Send and read Slack messages via slackcli. Multiple workspace support with browser token authentication. Includes helper script for token extraction.

windows-vm

Creates/manages/connects to headless Windows 11 VM via Docker + KVM (uses dockur/windows). Full lifecycle: create, start, stop, restart, ssh, status. Automated setup of OpenSSH Server, Node.js, Claude Code inside the VM.

New Script Artifacts

Dependency Requirements (new vs. seed)

The seed has no runtime dependencies. Lab adds:

• tmux — for interactive command control
• mcp CLI tool — for MCP-CLI skill
• Docker + KVM — for windows-vm skill
• slackcli + browser token — for slack-messaging