using-superpowers
The bootstrap skill, injected at session start (and again after compaction). It is the reason a 14-skill library behaves as a whole methodology: it establishes the rule that the agent must find and invoke a relevant skill before any response or action — including clarifying questions, codebase exploration, or file reads.
The rule: “If you think there is even a 1% chance a skill might apply to what you are doing, you ABSOLUTELY MUST invoke the skill. IF A SKILL APPLIES TO YOUR TASK, YOU DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE.”
It sets skill priority (process skills like sp-brainstorming / sp-systematic-debugging run first and set the approach, then implementation skills), a Red Flags table of the exact rationalizations that mean stop, you’re talking yourself out of a skill (“this is just a simple question”, “I need more context first”, “let me explore the codebase first”), and a precedence order (user instructions > skills > default behavior). This is pattern-anti-rationalization applied to skill discovery itself — the mechanism that makes every other Superpowers skill non-optional.
No stage: it is a meta/dispatcher skill, not a lifecycle activity. It is the direct counterpart to the other frameworks’ routers — addy-using-agent-skills, gstack-router, and mp-ask-matt — but is the most coercive of the four: the others help the agent pick a skill; this one forbids it from not picking one.
See Also
- sp-writing-skills — the other meta skill; grows the library this one enforces.
- addy-using-agent-skills · gstack-router · mp-ask-matt — cross-framework routers.
- pattern-anti-rationalization — the technique it embodies.
- superpowers — the framework whose gated pipeline this bootstrap activates.