Superpowers for GitHub Copilot

Jesse Vincent’s Superpowers skill library, installed into any project as GitHub Copilot custom instructions, so agent mode is told to brainstorm, plan, test first, debug, verify and ask for review before it calls work done.

This repository adds the Copilot layer: project-scoped installers for PowerShell and Bash, four Copilot prompt files, a Claude Code to Copilot tool-name mapping, and a CI test suite. The details are under What’s different from upstream.

Credit. The workflow and the skills are the work of Jesse Vincent and the contributors to obra/superpowers, released under the MIT license. This repository adapts that work for GitHub Copilot. It does not claim authorship of the upstream workflow or skills.

What it does

• Ships the 14 upstream skills as plain SKILL.md files that Copilot agent mode reads with read_file.
• Installs per project: one marked block in .github/copilot-instructions.md plus four prompt files (/brainstorm, /write-plan, /execute-plan, /debug).
• Keeps the guidance a project already has in .github/copilot-instructions.md. Re-running the installer updates the block in place, and uninstall removes the block (trimming leading and trailing whitespace from what remains). Prompt files are ownership-aware: the installer records what it wrote in .github/prompts/.superpowers-manifest (SHA-256 per file). It never overwrites a same-named prompt it did not create, and uninstall deletes only prompts it installed and you have not edited. A prompt you changed after install is kept, and so is any prompt that differs from what was installed.
• Maps the Claude Code tool names the skills use (Task, TodoWrite, Bash, …) to Copilot agent-mode tools.
• Runs a PowerShell test suite in CI on pushes to main and on pull requests.

It does not install VS Code, enable Copilot, change global Copilot settings, or run a skill by itself.

Install

You need git, PowerShell 7 or Bash, and VS Code with GitHub Copilot Chat in agent mode. Clone once to the default location below, then run the installer from the root of each project that should use the skills.