I'm feeling, and you, you gave a really interesting kind of amazing answer to,

Just in terms of technical security posture, if you are a direct target of a state actor and you are not yourself a large organization with deep resources, it is very hard to defend against a state actor who's decided that they want to compromise you.

There is not much you can do.

But that's not really how I think about the Chinese model thing you're talking about.

It's more...

I'm more thinking from the open source side.

And so I remember a moment when Visual Studio Code first launched their co-pilot agentic code complete stuff.

Can you tell us about that job and that experience?

I mean, what's changed as the models have gotten better?

Sure.

So Superpower started off as a series of blog posts that I wrote around how I was doing agentic development.

And it was a little bit of thinking and some example prompts.

And then sometime in, I guess it was probably early, mid 2025, anthropic gave Claude.ai, the website, the ability to make Office documents, which seemed kind of interesting.

And I went and asked Claude, hey, how are you able to do this? And he said, well, I've got these skill.md files sitting in my slash opt directory on the Linux machine they gave me.

First, it was, wait, wait, wait, cloud.ai has Linux machines behind the chatbot.

And how is that? Why is that? Why should this audience, which are mostly enterprise developers, care about what you're building?

for having me.

Should we start right with the test deleting incident? Yeah, tell us about it.

All right.

So like Sam said, I've been using Cloud Code since the day it shipped and spent a bunch of time sort of teaching myself.

what I was thinking of as literal prompt engineering of engineering of prompts to make the agents behave.

One of the rules that I'd had in my Cloud.MD was that all tests were called responsibility.

And another rule was that a single test failure was akin to project failure.

All right, so walk me through the plan here.

Can you maybe walk us through your career arc, maybe for people who haven't heard about you yet? What is Jesse Vincent all about and what are superpowers and what are all your projects before? Sure.

So...

When I was still in school, I started working on a ticketing system.

So Customer Service, Help Desk, Ops, a product called RT, or Quest Tracker.

It's open source.

It has been around for literally 30 years.

There's a little company I own back in Boston that still makes supports and sells as SaaS RT, but it's all open source.

The quality review, is that happening right now?