Worth pausing to note how much better Claude Code/Opus 4.6 are than wherever they were at about a year ago. The biggest improvements, given my earliest complaints, are around memory and long-term context preservation: Fewer repeat mistakes, fewer bananas derails.

I’ve also added a couple of tools that have made the experience much better:

Superpowers is a development workflow that adds a set of skills including:

• brainstorming
• writing-plans
• subagent-driven-development or executing-plans
• requesting-code-review

The brainstorming and planning phase involve a lot of helpful, clarifying questions. The spec files it produces are helpful. The reviews it runs catch inconsistencies and gaps. It adds a few minutes to work on any given feature, but the rate of “got it in one” has shot through the roof, and taking a moment to read its specs and plans offers a lot of reassurance that there’ll be fewer misalignments.

On the other end of the process, Impeccable is a set of visual design skills that address gaps in typography, layout, color, visual rhythm, and more. The starting point with an Impeccable session is the /critique skill, which leads to a set of recommendations on which of its many skills to use.

A lot of the stuff Claude Code produced for aSystem/aCloud was very “my first Rails app default view” in quality. A little back and forth with Claude cleaned up the worst of it, but Impeccable acts a lot more like a design partner, asking about the app’s “brand image,” and walking through questionnaires that are a little educational on their own. Pages that felt like long slogs through undifferentiated metadata became a lot more readable very quickly.