Code like a surgeon by Geoffrey Litt

A lot of the “secondary” tasks are “grunt work”, not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work. I have a strong preference for teams where everyone shares the grunt work; I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow.

With AI this concern completely disappears! Now I can happily delegate pure grunt work. And the 24/7 availability is a big deal. I would never call a human intern at 11pm and tell them to have a research report on some code ready by 7am… but here I am, commanding my agent to do just that!

The idea being AI works on the secondary stuff and keep it ready while you work on the primary stuff.

I found the above idea important as well, to rotate grunt work among the full team. I have had this in the past where senior members would not work on tickets, etc.

We try to make sure everyone works on everything.

Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

Skills are what give your agents Superpowers.

The first time they really popped up on my radar was a few weeks ago when Anthropic rolled out improved Office document creation. When the feature rolled out, I went poking around a bit – I asked Claude to tell me all about its new skills. And it was only too happy to dish.

This is how Claude creates docs with that new feature that came out.

These are basically markdown documents that Claude reads to do things a certain way.

This post is full of so much interesting stuff. Like Claude can use this to read a book, or doc, or repo and teach itself new skills.

This is how to install it.

You'll need Claude Code 2.0.13 or so. Fire it up and then run:

/plugin marketplace add obra/superpowers-marketplace
/plugin install superpowers@superpowers-marketplace 

Quit and restart claude and you should be good to go.

Designing agentic loops by Simon Willison

One way to think about coding agents is that they are brute force tools for finding solutions to coding problems. If you can reduce your problem to a clear goal and a set of tools that can iterate towards that goal a coding agent can often brute force its way to an effective solution.

This is an interesting idea. I need to try it out.