Does Superpowers support domain-specific specialist agents in subagent-driven-development?
I'm using the Superpowers subagent-driven-development workflow in Claude Code and want to add frontend, backend, database, and security specialists that plug into the existing implementer + reviewer flow. I asked whether to use multiple prompt templates, separate specialist skills, or a plugin-level agents directory, but the maintainer closed the issue as not planned. What is the supported way to get domain-specific behavior?
Originally asked on GitHub: https://github.com/obra/superpowers/issues/248
1 answer
Status: closed as not planned (explained). In March 2026 the maintainer closed the issue, saying Superpowers does not intend to support domain-specific specialist agents. The general-purpose implementer subagent in
subagent-driven-developmentis intentionally domain-agnostic, so there is no built-in mechanism to dispatch a frontend, backend, database, or security specialist based on the task.The only workaround given in the thread is to add the domain-specific instructions you want to your
CLAUDE.md. The maintainer did not evaluate the three proposed architectures (multiple prompt templates, separate specialist skills, or a plugin-level agents directory), and the thread does not explain how domain detection or specialist-specific reviewers should work. If you need specialist behavior today, you will have to implement it yourself; the maintainer's only official suggestion is theCLAUDE.mdinstruction approach.General advice: because the SDD implementer is intentionally domain-agnostic, built-in specialist support is unlikely to arrive soon. If you keep your domain knowledge in separate reference files and reference them from
CLAUDE.md, you can avoid bloating the skill while keeping the existing spec-review and code-quality-review stages unchanged—but that is my general guidance, not something the maintainer stated in the thread.Did this work for you?