I spent an evening this summer reading a public methodology plugin for coding agents, obra/superpowers, skill file by skill file. It encodes, as rules the agent has to load, most of what I do by judgment. Reading someone else's rulebook for your own practice is a strange and useful exercise, because it shows you which of your habits are principles and which are just habits. This is what I found, as I read it in July; the project moves quickly and may have changed since.
What the Plugin Encodes
| Plugin rule | What I do | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| A design gate before any code is written | Roughly seventy percent of the effort goes in before the agent writes anything | Agree |
| Plans written for "an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste" | The zero-edit PRD: complete enough that the agent needs no clarification | Agree, and the phrase is better than mine |
| A fresh subagent per task, with two-stage review | Scoped agents for bounded tasks; review is a human at the merge | Partly |
| Test-first as an iron law | Example-based tests for the happy path, the edge, and the error case, written with the spec | Partly |
| A verification-before-completion skill | The agent will say it is done long before it is; taste the soup | Agree |
The two agreements at the top surprised me by how exactly they matched. The plugin's design gate is my seventy percent, written down as a rule the agent cannot skip. And "an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste" is the most precise description of the reader of a spec I have seen. It is the reader I write for. I had never named it.
What the Rigid Version Gets Right
A human improviser forgets the verification step on the day they are tired. The plugin does not. That is the entire argument for productizing a practice, and it is the same argument I made for gates: a preference decays, a rule keyed to an observable signal does not. For a team that does not yet have the instincts, a workflow that forces the design conversation, forces the plan, forces the test, and forces the verification is going to beat a team of improvisers most weeks, because the improvisers will skip one of those four on the weeks that matter.
It also makes the practice teachable. I have spent real effort building onboarding so that other product managers can stand up the same toolchain. A plugin that installs the method is a shortcut to the part of that I was doing by hand.
Where Lived Practice Diverges
Three places, and they share a shape. The plugin's two-stage review is agent reviewing agent. Mine ends with a person at the merge, and I have no plans to remove that person, because the checkpoint is where human judgment earns its keep. The plugin makes test-first a law, which is correct, but a law cannot make the tests good, and designing the evaluation is the hard skill. A rule that says "write tests first" is satisfied by bad tests. And the plugin has no notion of where the human's time goes. It treats the human as a reviewer at the end. My split is seventy up front, twenty reviewing, ten in the loop, and the up-front part is the job.
The fourth divergence is direction. The plugin brainstorms with you. My rule runs the other way: the agent interviews me, because I cannot see my own assumptions and its questions can. Ask, do not assume, is a rule about who holds the pen during the design conversation, and I want the agent asking.
The Honest Synthesis
| A rigid workflow gets right | A human improviser gets right |
|---|---|
| It runs every step every time | It knows which step matters today |
| It makes the method installable | It adapts the method to the domain |
| It cannot be talked out of verification | It can tell good verification from theater |
| It scales to people without the instincts | It builds the instincts |
The productized version is a strong default for teams without the instincts, and I would recommend it to one without hesitation. The real thing is the same skeleton with a person placed exactly where judgment matters: at the evaluation, at the merge, and at the front of the process where the questions get asked. Read the plugin. Steal the phrasing. Keep the person.