Give Your Agents Superpowers: Jesse Vincent Live with Tim O’Reilly

Jesse Vincent has been building tools that help people do their best work for 30 years. You’ve probably heard of at least one of his projects, maybe Request Tracker (still running bug trackers around the world since 1996), K-9 Mail (now Thunderbird for Android), or his and Kaia Dekker’s Keyboardio ergonomic mechanical keyboards. Last year Jesse launched something a little different, drawn from his experience using AI coding assistants: an open source agentic development methodology he calls Superpowers.

Built on top of a set of composable skills, along with some instructions that make sure your agent actually uses them, Superpowers plugs into the world's most widely used coding agents and teaches them exactly how Jesse works. It’s just the kind of pattern Tim O’Reilly has argued will shape the future AI + human knowledge economy. As Tim explained back in March, “If a Skill is like handing a colleague a detailed playbook for a particular job, a Superpower is more like the professional habits and instincts that make someone effective at everything they do. Superpowers are meta-skills. They don’t tell the agent what to do. They shape how it thinks about what to do.” No surprise that it’s become one of the most widely adopted open source projects in AI-assisted development, with more than half a million installs, and ranks among the 50 most-starred public repositories on GitHub. As Jesse pointed out in his announcement post, “Superpowers are for everybody.”

Tim invited Jesse to share Superpowers’ origin story and talk about how the project has evolved alongside the capabilities of frontier models. (It’s currently on version 6, which you can read about on Jesse’s blog, Massively Parallel Procrastination.) They'll get into how a personal CLAUDE.md file and a handful of prompts turned into a full development methodology used by hundreds of thousands of engineers, what Jesse had to get right about brainstorming, planning, and test-driven development before an agent could follow the process without him in the room, and why "writing skills" became one of the first skills Superpowers ever taught itself. They’ll also chat about the next rung in the hierarchy of skills, the work Jesse’s doing with Simon Willison, Drew Ritter, and Eden Kettleson over at his AI research lab Prime Radiant, and what it means for the software industry when a Superpowered novice can independently tap into Jesse’s 30 years of experience rather than slowly gleaning that knowledge by putting in the time alongside someone like Jesse.

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