Our team has been building software together for over a decade. Our previous startup, Gradescope, is used worldwide at thousands of universities to grade the work of millions of students. We’ve built full-stack web apps, trained deep learning models, and developed AI agents.
In the last couple of months, we’ve experienced two unlocks that probably doubled our productivity.
Unlock #1: Claude Code
The first shift was starting to use Claude Code, a command-line-based software engineering agent.
We were previously using GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which are awesome tools. However, you are still single-threaded when using them, working on one thing at a time. And sometimes, that’s the right move.
But often, there are several tasks that you could be working on in parallel. Claude Code allows you to do that — it makes you multi-threaded.
Truly leaning into that multi-threadedness required a bit of an investment. To allow multiple Claude Codes to work on multiple tasks without interfering with each other, we set up git worktrees. While this was a workable solution, it had a number of problems.
First, juggling the worktrees added significant mental overhead and actually began straining our laptops, as each worktree required its own running docker-compose setup (we use Rails, Postgres, Minio, etc.).
Second, we observed that Claude Code would generate a great solution one time, and then go off the rails the next time. We started launching several attempts for each task, such that there would be at least one good solution in the bunch. But local worktrees just weren't flexible enough for multiple agent attempts on multiple tasks at once.
Third, we also wanted to continue working with Claude Code on our phones while away from the desk: while waiting in line, on our commutes, etc. It's often that a short message allows Claude Code to keep making substantial progress.
So, we pressed pause on an app we were working on and built a solution to enable all of this.
Unlock #2: Superconductor
Here's what we built:
- Set up one or more repos in an instant cloud environment.
- Write up any number of tickets, dropping in images and PDFs if needed.
- Spin up many Claude Codes (or Amps, Codexes, or Geminis) for each ticket.
- Chat and review diffs from a mobile-friendly interface.
- Quickly review solutions, and then submit a GitHub PR for the best one.
Most importantly, each solution has a live running app preview. That means that you can quickly verify an agent's solution, before even reading the diff.
Superconductor is currently in private beta, and we are actively onboarding teams. Sign up today!