Test-driven development

The strict red-green-refactor loop, written so an agent cannot quietly write the test after the code.

Installation

$ npx skills add obra/superpowers

The CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in obra/superpowers, not test-driven-development alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.

Summary

The strict red-green-refactor loop, written so an agent cannot quietly write the test after the code.

  • Reach for it when you want the test to be evidence the code works, not a transcript of what it already does.
  • Spans Implement and Test, so it is usually worth loading for the whole piece of work rather than at one moment in it.
  • Stack-agnostic — nothing in it assumes a particular language or framework.
  • Published by Jesse Vincent. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
  • Installing pulls the whole obra/superpowers repository: this catalogue lists 13 other entries from it, and the repo may hold more.

Where it sits in delivery

ImplementWriting the change: framework-specific conventions, and the discipline that keeps a long agent run on the rails.Everything in Build →
TestProving the change does what it claims — and finding the assertions that were never written.Everything in Test →

The skill itself

The full text lives with its publisher and changes when they change it. Read it there rather than here — a mirrored copy of somebody else's procedure goes stale silently, and this page would have no way of telling you.

Related

More in Implement