Explyt Debugger Outperforms Superpowers AI Skill, Using Half the Tokens on Real Kotlin Bug

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A controlled comparison tested two AI-assisted debugging approaches — Explyt's built-in Debug skill and the Superpowers systematic-debugging skill — on the same real Kotlin bug involving an AccessDeniedException from a protected Windows Installer directory. The Explyt run consumed 67,000 tokens to resolve the issue, while the Superpowers run used 132,000 tokens on the same prompt with the same model. The token gap stemmed from Explyt supplying a concrete runtime fact early via a debugger breakpoint, whereas the Superpowers run spent more context on speculative code changes, tests, and refactoring without ever inspecting a live value. The Superpowers run identified a plausible root cause but proposed wrapping the error in a try/catch returning an empty list, which masked the failure rather than surfacing it — making a permission-denied directory indistinguishable from a genuinely empty one. The author notes this was a single informal case study, not a formal benchmark of either product.

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