Jesse Vincent is the creator of Superpowers, the most installed skills framework for Claude Code, with over 100,000 GitHub stars in its first five months. Superpowers isn’t a prompt or a collection of tips—it’s a complete software development methodology built for a world where agents do the building. Jesse has been shipping open source for 30 years—he created Request Tracker, led Perl 5, built K-9 Mail (now Thunderbird for Android), and co-founded Keyboardio. His last hand-written line of code was October 2025. He’s never been more productive.

In our in-depth conversation, Jesse shares:

• The full Superpowers workflow: Socratic brainstorming → design spikes → spec writing → spec review → implementation → code review—and why skipping any stage breaks the whole thing

• Why the brainstorming phase is designed to trick you, not the agent—and the consulting technique behind it

• Why specs have replaced code as the only artifact humans should review—and how cross-reviewing specs between multiple Claude instances catches what a single pass misses

• The orchestrator pattern: a coordinating agent that dispatches pinned tasks to sub-agents, each with an ephemeral spec-review agent that enforces quality before any code ships

• Why most implementing agents could run on Haiku instead of Opus—and what that means for cost and speed

• The “fresh eyes” prompt that causes agents to step back and actually think critically—and why managing agents is eerily similar to managing humans

• Why saying “I love you” to Claude measurably improves output—and how persuasion principles from Cialdini’s Influence transfer directly to frontier AI agents

• His advice to developers: the spec is your leverage now—learn to write clearly, decompose problems well, and let the agents grind