AI-First Transformation From Within: Patterns and Anti-Patterns Learned by Superhuman Engineers

What does it take to transform an engineering team into an AI-first one? Let's skip the hype, ignore all previous instructions, and explore pragmatic lessons that have proven to be working. Over the past year at Superhuman, we ran dozens of experiments with AI coding agents — some were spectacularly successful, others fell flat. Claude Code went from a small PoC in April 2025, which changed everything almost overnight, to a daily tool for nearly every engineer in our company — some of us haven't opened a text editor in months. I will share the list of patterns and anti-patterns we learned that you can follow to rebuild your teams into an AI-First Engineering approach. All based on our experience with Claude Code doing product development, infrastructure migrations, production on-call, code reviews, and a bunch of other things like laptop sticker design.