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0002: Superpowers declined as a dependency; three of five ideas adopted natively

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-08-28
  • Related: 0001

Context​

The "superpowers" toolkit was evaluated alongside nj-agents for adoption. It bundles skills covering, among other things, red-before-green testing discipline, diagnose-before-patch debugging, and plan-conformance checking — all things Orion's own build/verify stages could use. But superpowers also ships /execute-plan, which wants to drive the sequence of implementation work itself: deciding what runs next, checking its own plan format, looping until it judges the work done.

Per 0001, Orion already owns control flow across stages. /execute-plan and Orion's own stage sequencer would each assume they are the one deciding what happens next — two control-flow owners cannot compose, regardless of how good either one is in isolation.

Decision​

Superpowers is declined as a dependency. It is not installed, and Orion does not invoke /execute-plan or any other superpowers entry point that drives its own sequence.

Three of the five evaluated ideas are adopted anyway, but natively — implemented as Orion-owned gates inside stages Orion already sequences, not as calls into the superpowers plugin:

  • OR-156 — red-before-green: require a failing test before a fix is accepted. Recorded as built in 0037.
  • OR-157 — diagnose-before-patch: require a stated root cause before the CI fix loop patches.
  • OR-158 — plan-conformance: check the implementation against the reviewed plan before it ships.

The other two ideas evaluated from the same set were not carried forward.

Consequences​

  • No dependency on the superpowers plugin is added; the three adopted ideas live as Orion-native checks inside Orion's own loops (e.g. the CI fix loop for OR-157), so they compose the same way any other Orion gate does.
  • This record exists so the rejection doesn't have to be re-argued: if superpowers (or an equivalent toolkit) is re-proposed as a dependency, the objection is /execute-plan's control-flow ownership specifically, not the quality of its ideas — extracting an idea and implementing it as an Orion-owned gate remains open, adopting the toolkit wholesale does not.
  • If more of superpowers' ideas turn out to be worth having, adopt them the same way OR-156/157/158 were: implement the idea as an Orion-owned gate, and do not adopt any entry point that competes with Orion's sequencer.