What SAP Superpowers actually is — and why it'll end up on every SAP consultant's laptop.

Every SAP consultant has the same Monday morning. A client message. A production dump. A steering committee that wants a number. A junior who needs the playbook you wrote three projects ago and can't find.

Generic AI hasn't helped. Chatbots hallucinate tcodes. Copilot invents BAPIs. SAP's own Joule does exactly what SAP designed it for — in-tenant, in-app, in natural language — but it was never meant to read the ABAP in your IDE, write a fit-gap in a Word doc, or hold a project accountable to its own gate log. That work lives on the consultant's laptop.

SAP Superpowers is the laptop-side piece. It's an open-source Claude Code plugin that makes Claude behave like a senior SAP consultant — one who refuses to say “done” without proof, refuses to leak your client data, and refuses to let you skip a go-live gate because a VP is tired of waiting. Joule on the inside. Superpowers on the outside. Both necessary.

A skill is a Markdown file. That's it. No code. No orchestration layer. No SDK to learn. But each file carries five things that generic prompts don't:

1. Iron Laws — non-negotiable rules. (“Never SELECT on BSEG. Always use CDS view I_JournalEntryItem.”)
2. Rationalization Table — anticipated shortcuts and their counters. The model gets told, in advance, the exact excuses it will reach for.
3. Red Flags — self-monitoring trigger phrases. If Claude starts saying “let me just assume…”, the skill catches it.
4. Hard Gates — evidence-based blocking conditions. The skill literally will not advance past Gate 4 without an ST22 screenshot attached.
5. Verification — completion criteria with required artifacts. “Done” means a file exists, not a feeling.

Not all skills are equal-weight. Module reference carries the heaviest share because SAP module depth is where most AI tools fail first. Here's the breakdown:

Every skill produces an artifact. Every artifact has a verification checklist. Nothing is decorative.

SAP go-lives fail for a simple reason: someone skipped a gate. Not maliciously — the steering committee got impatient, the UAT sign-off was “verbal”, the cutover dry-run was “abbreviated”. Two weeks later, the hypercare phase turns into hypercare hell.

The /sap-go-live-readiness skill has 10 gates. Each one has a required evidence checklist. Claude literally cannot output “Gate 4: PASS” without the artifact reference. The steering committee sees the gate log — not your optimism.

SAP data is never casual data. Payroll tables. Tax IDs. Banking details. Customer master. Employee PII. The moment an AI tool casually reads one of those, you have a GDPR conversation you don't want to have.

Superpowers ships a PreToolUse hook that inspects every tool call before it runs. Eight blocklist categories — hard-blocks on payroll, credentials, national IDs. Soft-blocks with warnings on master data and business documents. Overrides require explicit, per-session user approval, logged.

The result: sensitive data never reaches the model in the first place. You can ship this plugin to a bank. You can ship it to a pharma company. You can ship it to your own laptop and your client doesn't get a nasty surprise in six months.

A common question: does this replace SAP Joule? No. Joule is SAP's own copilot, designed for in-tenant assistance — natural-language queries, in-app guidance, and process orchestration against live SAP data. Superpowers is designed for the other half of the job: the work that happens in the consultant's IDE — code, specs, transports, methodology, deliverables. You deploy both, and they meet in the middle.

There are ~500,000 SAP consultants on Earth. Most work in shops that can't pay for another enterprise AI license, can't wait for the SAP roadmap, and can't justify a fine-tune-your-own-LLM startup subscription.

Superpowers has zero license cost. Zero telemetry. Zero vendor lock-in. Works with Claude Free, Pro, Max, Claude Code, Cursor, and every Markdown-reading agent. The barrier to trying it is one command.

That's what makes it viral. Not the feature list — the install gradient. One star on GitHub → one screenshot on LinkedIn → one SAP consultant tries it on a Monday → their whole team installs it by Friday. The flywheel is on.