Four-arm test: plain prompt beats Superpowers and SDD plugins on Opus 5.5, 94 vs 56

Mithrandir_Solo · reddit · 2026-10-22

A developer ran a four-arm comparison on a full-stack task with spec already in hand: prompt-only vs SDD vs SDD+skills vs Superpowers, scored on quality (40%), human effort (25%), speed (20%) and cost (15%). Prompt-only won overall at 94, ahead of SDD (80), skills stack (67) and Superpowers (56), leading on every dimension. Caveat: the test didn't cover the vague-idea brainstorming phase where these tools may still help, and the author asks why no benchmark exists for ways of working rather than models.

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