In 1989, my dad rented a Nintendo console to distract me from a bout of chickenpox. I was seven. My mother and I played Mario and Contra, and I spent an unreasonable amount of time being defeated by the first Goomba. There was a whole world beyond that creature. I just had to figure out how to get there.
I returned to that memory when I wrote a personal AI manifesto in April 2025. Generative AI had brought back something familiar: the pleasure of being a beginner, the frustration of getting stuck, and the conviction that working through the frustration would be worth it. I gave myself a few rules. Suspend the ego. Build things. Persist beyond the delightful first demo. Allow myself to learn faster than I thought possible.
Since then, through my own experiments, the courses I teach on Maven, and my work with teams and executives, I’ve been exploring where those rules lead. The tools keep changing. The question that interests me has become more expansive: what happens when people can bring much more of their expertise and imagination into the things they build?
That is the territory I want to explore with Super IC.
IC stands for individual contributor. If you manage people, stay with me. I wrote in 2023 about how becoming a manager doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to practise your craft. The maker-versus-manager tussle has occupied a fair bit of my working life. As you grow in your career, your calendar fills up and the distance between you and the thing being built can grow with it. You get very good at talking about the work. Finding an uninterrupted afternoon to do some of it becomes a minor logistical miracle.
AI has given me a way to close some of that distance. An idea can become a working prototype while I am still figuring out what I mean. I can explore a question, build something to test it, discover what I got wrong, and try again. There is enormous joy in that loop. Anyone who has spent years moving between documents, meetings and dependencies will understand why getting back into it feels liberating.
The expertise you bring to this matters. A product manager’s understanding of a customer, a designer’s eye for an interaction, an engineer’s instinct for where a system will break: these have taken years to develop. AI gives us new ways to apply them, including in parts of the work we previously depended entirely on someone else to attempt. Knowing what good looks like becomes more consequential when you can produce ten plausible versions of something before lunch.
Of course, one of those versions may be confidently, elaborately wrong. A functioning demo can conceal a remarkable number of problems. You still have to inspect the work, test your assumptions, and understand enough to know when you need help. That requires time and the willingness to feel incompetent again. A senior title doesn’t come with immunity from the learning curve. (I have checked.)
There is also a question of what happens to all this learning. In 2021, I described a playbook as something you could repeat, teach to someone else, and examine afterwards to see whether it had been used properly. I keep coming back to that idea as I work with AI agents. The instructions, examples and checks that help an agent do useful work are also a way of making our own expertise explicit. How do I make this decision? What do I always check? Which exceptions have I learnt to watch for?
Getting those things out of your head takes effort. Once you do, you can test them, improve them, and share them with your team. Some of the most valuable work in becoming a Super IC may be explaining something you have been doing almost unconsciously for years.
This is where the conversation has to expand beyond the individual.
A team can have several people getting dramatically faster at their own tasks and still take just as long to deliver anything useful. A prototype built in an afternoon can sit in a review queue for two weeks. More drafts can mean more work for the person who has to read them. The gains have to survive contact with the rest of the organization.
We need to look at the work between people: the handoffs, the missing context, the decisions nobody is quite sure they are allowed to make. As the boundaries between product, design and engineering become easier to cross, we will also have to get better at crossing them respectfully. I can bring a working interface to a designer and have a much richer conversation. I still need their expertise. The ability to attempt more of the work should make collaboration more interesting, while keeping responsibility for its quality clear.
For companies, this asks something of leadership too. Buying access to AI is a starting point. People need time to learn, useful problems to work on, and colleagues with whom they can compare notes. Leaders need to participate in that learning. It is difficult to build a culture of experimentation if everyone feels obliged to show up with a polished success story.
Then comes a choice I find particularly interesting: what do we do with the capacity we recover? Which neglected customer problem can we finally address? Which experiment was always too expensive to try? What could a small team now take on? Efficiency matters, but I want us to be at least as curious about the possibilities it creates. Otherwise, we risk using a remarkable expansion of capability to make our ambitions smaller.
And some of that recovered capacity belongs outside work. I’ve written about side quests because they have shaped so much of my life. Learning an instrument, reading fiction, following a strange question, spending an unhurried evening with family: these deserve room of their own. I would like becoming better at work to help make that room.
Super IC will be a field journal of this exploration. I’ll share things I’m building, workflows worth trying, experiments that fall apart, and lessons from teaching and working with teams. We’ll get into the details of prototypes, agents and evaluating their work. We’ll also look at how organizations learn, how expertise travels, and what happens to our careers when we can do more than our job descriptions suggest.
I expect to revise my views along the way. That was part of the original manifesto too.
For now, there is a lot of world beyond the first Goomba. I’d like to see more of it.
Welcome to Super IC.
What have you wanted to build, learn or try that has stayed on the “someday” list? Hit reply and tell me.