We just crossed 50,000 members 🎉. Today. Not a projection. Not a “coming soon” slide. That number broke because Jake showed up with ICM and actually shipped it into a room that doesn’t treat people like leads. The welcome here isn’t a drip sequence. It’s people answering questions, sharing the folder, and sticking around after the first win. Most communities rent attention. This one compounds it. Jake’s ICM didn’t land in a vacuum - it landed in a stack that already preferred transparent workflows over vendor theater. Members didn’t just buy. They stayed, tested, and pulled the next person in. From empty chairs to a milestone that pays people back. Stop chasing the next shiny cohort. Start owning the room that keeps grinding after the launch email dies. If you’re in, say what you got out of it. If you’re watching, the door’s still open.

We all know AI as a great assistant, one that can help you brainstorm and generate creative results from a wide array of data it's been trained on. But here's what we often miss: it's not always going to give you the best results. And that makes sense, actually, because AI doesn't have judgment. It can only provide possible solutions based on your input (context, data, prompt). The amazing results we get are usually slightly above average, but they appear great, especially if you know very little in the area you're working on. This in itself is not a bad thing. I'm not trying to point out a flaw in AI. I'm trying to highlight an important insight. YOUR EXPERTISE ALWAYS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE If you've ever worked with AI on a subject you're an expert in, you probably know what I'm talking about. When your expertise is actively influencing your work with AI, the results are directly proportional to your level of expertise. This is where you witness the full power of AI. When you help it navigate the right trained data based on your judgment and expertise, you create unique results others can't replicate. This is why I always say: focus primarily on your industry. There's a lot your years of experience can unlock, and it's a win-win, because those with no plans to switch careers get to deepen their work in the field they know best. I believe everyone should work with AI across three layers: 1. Primary AI work, where you use your expertise and experience to create unique work and improve your industry. 2. Secondary AI work, the auxiliary functions needed for your primary AI work, business, projects, and other important tasks. 3. Tertiary AI work, which powers your hobbies, entertainment, and other luxuries. This is how industries maintain their relevance, prosperity becomes attainable, and the quality of the human experience is preserved in these times. What kind of work are you using AI for?

Most free AI courses are a teaser. A few videos. Then a paywall. Anthropic’s Academy is not that. Thirteen courses. Listed at $0. Built by the team that ships Claude. No subscription. No upsell after the last lesson. That is worth an evening. Not because a certificate will hire you. Because the work teaches how the model fails, not just how to chat with it. If you just landed in Clief Notes and you still treat Claude like a smarter search box, start here. You do not need to be a developer. You do need one loop you can finish. Three tracks - AI Fluency. How to think with the model. Where it lies. Where it helps. Everyone starts here. - Developer. API, Claude Code, MCP. User to builder. - Specialized. Students, educators, nonprofits, AWS, Google Cloud. Only after 101. The instinct to kill: skipping Fluency and jumping to agents. That instinct is wrong. You will ship slop faster. Where to start tonight New to AI: Claude 101, then AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations. Want to build: Building with the Claude API, then Introduction to MCP. Education or nonprofit: Claude 101, then your specialized course. Most courses are 1 to 4 hours. Two in a weekend is enough. How you get in 1. Open Anthropic Academy on Skilljar. 2. Make a free account. 3. Pick a course marked $0. 4. Finish the lessons. 5. Download the certificate if you want the paper. https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ The certificate is a bonus. The useful part is a working sense of when Claude is wrong. That is the skill that compounds. Do Claude 101 this weekend. Bring back one thing that broke your current prompt habit. Drop it under this post. I want the boring version, not the certificate screenshot.

Hey Clief Notes fam! 👋 I'm Ray and I'm stoked to be here. That last sentence is 100% true but I’m 63 years old so don’t use the word stoked, but it was in the template so I’m gonna leave it in 😁 🙋 A little about me: I look after the finances for 2 small companies. One, a street food company, loves ICM even though they have no clue what it is. I get to play with all their data to see what we can create with it. I joined Clief Notes back in April. I watched a lot of the lessons and went away to play around with folders. I keep coming back when I get stuck but probably should spend more time in here. 🎯 My current goal: I’m probably like a lot of people in here, I can see the potential that ICM offers but haven’t figured out how to make a business out of it yet. That’s what I’m aiming for… 💪 What I'm currently building/working on: The first process I automated was a production sheet for the kitchen. The old way… Email orders arrived and the products, production dates, and purchase order numbers were manually entered into the sheet. This sheet became the source of truth that the Invoices and shipping labels were created from. About 50 customers, ~100 orders per week, and 1000’s of data points all being manually entered into an Excel sheet. Invoices were created manually, as were the shipping labels. This was not just time-consuming, it also resulted in a ton of mistakes being made every week. The new way… Email orders arrive, and go into their weekly folder. Claude reads them and creates the production sheet. When needed, it spits out CSVs that get uploaded to our CRM to create the invoices and labels. The old way took 2 full days for someone to complete, a lot of that time was unpicking the mistakes that got spotted then editing invoices, labels etc. but mistakes still got through. The new way takes less than 1 hour per week and we’ve only had 1 mistake in the last 4 months. That was down to a human (me) losing an email. We’re introducing other tools as well, a time/vacation tool that keeps track of everything for our payroll. An ingredients/recipe tool that tells the kitchen what it needs to buy to fulfil orders and how much it can spend. And others…

This might not be sustainable since these days we want every thing to be a workflow we never have to return to. But I thought to share because someone might need this. These days I tend to write down thoughts as they come and this practice has helped me write more. It’s a refreshing experience and I’m grateful for that. I remember the early days of grammarly. I used grammarly to structure my sentences and correct any typos or grammatical errors. But now everything goes through Claude. So if you can follow through with writing your first draft, here’s the hack. AI is great at refining drafts to make it clearer and preserve your idea without drifting. But it might introduce words and phrases outside of your voice. It’s even worse if it’s the AI voice that we don’t like. 💥HACK: When refining your draft, tell it to retain your voice and choice of words as much as possible except in times where there’s an unclear message, grammar issue or wrong choice of words. And for every change made, it has to give a summary of what changed and why so that we can apply judgment. If we think about, this doesn’t have to be a one-off exercise. You can begin to train your Copy agent based on these types of sessions and in no time you have a system that writes in your voice.