Jesse Vincent

Jesse Vincent, who created K-9 Mail, set out his coding-agent method in a note dated 5 October 2025: git worktrees to isolate tasks, several Claude Code sessions given distinct roles (an architect session for design, an implementer session for the code), work cut into small pieces, frequent commits, TDD, and a review pass through CodeRabbit with coderabbit-review-helper, a companion tool he wrote. Four days later he gathered the method under the name Superpowers.

Superpowers formalises skills as markdown SKILL.md files covering testing, debugging, collaboration, development, and the authoring of new skills. The kernel injects fewer than 2,000 tokens at startup; everything else loads on demand through a shell script. A memory layer copies Claude conversation transcripts out of the .claude directory before their automatic deletion after a month, indexes them in SQLite with vector search, and summarises them with Claude Haiku. By April 2026 the repository carried more than 130,000 stars and ran on Claude Code plugins, Cursor, Codex, and OpenCode. Vincent built it with the Prime Radiant team.

The recurring question in his practice is how far an agent's behaviour can be shaped by wording rather than by rules: he applies Cialdini's persuasion principles to prompts and pressure-tests skills against extreme scenarios to find their limits. The same instinct extends to cost. On 3 July 2026, Simon Willison relayed Vincent's advice to have Fable delegate smaller tasks to weaker models ahead of a token price rise, applied it, and reported his Fable allowance shrinking less quickly than before.