Acknowledgments and project boundary

Humanities Superpowers was inspired by Jesse Vincent's obra/superpowers project and by the work of the Prime Radiant community around systematic, composable skills for coding agents.

We are grateful for the project's clear insistence on systematic process, evidence before completion claims, reusable skills, planning, testing, and verification. Those ideas helped make it possible to imagine an analogous—but methodologically distinct—framework for humanities research.

Independence statement

• This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or maintained by Jesse Vincent, Prime Radiant, or the Superpowers project.
• Humanities Superpowers is not an official humanities edition, extension, or marketplace package of obra/superpowers.
• No Superpowers skill text is copied into this repository unless a future file explicitly states otherwise.
• The substantive procedures in skills/, workflows/, templates/, and examples/ were independently written for humanities research.
• Where implementation patterns, metadata conventions, or file structures are adapted from an MIT-licensed source, the relevant copyright and license notice must be preserved and documented in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Intellectual debt and methodological difference

The debt is architectural rather than disciplinary: composable skills, explicit triggers, stop conditions, and verification before completion. The difference is substantive: software correctness can often be tested against executable behavior, while humanities scholarship requires accountable interpretation, source criticism, conceptual boundaries, and judgments that remain open to contestation.

See differences.md for a detailed comparison.