The latest frontier models exhibit good process that was trained into them during the RL phase, and whilst that might make them massively more capable in terms of one-shot, or general coding ability, models without skills simply don't have a durable process.
If you have a need for procedure in your use of agents, you absolutely need skills like this. I'm not commenting on the relative merits of this or superpowers, but rather the seemingly religious debate, "skills are good" vs "skills are bad" discussion that keeps coming up.
Most of the comments here seem to focus on specific things people were trying to get out of skills, and whether those are still needed.
That is going to vary a lot.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to have a process that made your model work "properly" on tasks, sure that's probably not needed anymore.
If your goal with something like superpowers was to get a consistent set of artifacts alongside what was developed (quality varying, so i mean consistent here as "one design plan, one implementation plan", not "good"), nothing has changed, models do not do this consistently, in a durable fashion, without something telling them to do this.
Yes, for example, newer Opus will often decide to write a spec. But not always, and not with any consistent format or ...
If you want that to happen, you'd still need a skill making it happen.
If you don't care about that, then sure, you don't need the skill anymore.
People seem to have used various skills to achieve different things, and so have wildly different views on what is still necessary.
I do use skills for other things, I don't believe that skills are bad. I'm just not sure what they add in this case.
We use to say “web development is changing fast” when a thing changed after two years, and now it looks like it was changing at a snail’s pace compared to AI.
Why not just tell Claude to figure it out and build what it needs? Why do I need a plugin or a factory or whatever.
I just ask “can you go faster?” And claude suggests some stuff and mostly just works autonomously.
Yeah, for five minutes you needed to use a specific style, very specific language patterns and what have you, in order to get results that were a cut above. But then the models and the harnesses got better and that moment passed.