Hey Clief Notes members! I'm John Martin and I'm excited to be here. 🙋 A little about me: AI & Emerging Tech Manager at Columbia University (AI literacy + institutional AI deployments), plus a solo AI implementation practice on the side. 🎯 My current goal: Building a one-person business around Claude Code, MCP, and real-time 3D (UE5 + Blender) — productized AI pipelines, no team required. 💪 What I'm currently building/working on: Claude Code MCP integrations with Unreal and Blender, a multi-tenant booking platform (MVP shipped), and two-agent Claude + Codex workflows. 🤔 My biggest struggle or question right now: Time. Full-time job, family, solo builds — my challenge is scoping everything to the fastest path to shipped, and marketing consistently while heads-down building.

📣 Update (8/15/26): Comp 11 Rules Added --- What this thread is: I’ve seen a number of people either not know competitions are going on or know how to find them so here is a quick single source thread where you can get to them all. I’ll keep this updated as new challenges are released. See the current challenge as well as all past challenges below! Format for community challenges: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/how-competitions-work-from-now-on?p=84912d60 Weekly leaderboard competition: Alongside the biweekly challenges, there is a weekly leaderboard challenge where the member at the top of the 7 day rolling leaderboard wins a free upgrade to their membership. This winner is announced on Mondays typically. @Joshua Hubbard has gone another step further and created a thread linking to all competition entries. Link here: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/the-competition-archive-every-entry-every-week-every-link?p=bd752987 --- Current Challenge: Competition 11 The Challenge 💪 - Build a workflow that walks a system and leaves behind a map for those that follow. Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-11-the-cartographer?p=48566e59 Good luck everyone! --- Past Challenges Competition 1 The Challenge 💪 - Build a brand voice document for a pet grooming business Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/first-ever-weekly-competition-is-live?p=90f50bf9 Results🏆 - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-1-winner-ian-barriopedro?p=0501b57e Competition 2

This community is large and it moves fast. That's the good part and it's also the problem: valuable posts get buried, the same questions get re-asked instead of found, and spammers show up wherever there's an audience. These guidelines are what keeps the room worth showing up to. Read them once. You won't need them again, because most of this is what you'd do anyway. New here? Start with Jake's welcome post and the Foundation course. This post is about how we behave, not where to begin. 1. Build in public. Post the thing while it's half working. A half-finished build is more useful to everyone else than the polished writeup you'll never get around to, and you'll get corrected before you've spent a week going the wrong way. 2. Teach what you learn. The day you figure something out is the day you're best at explaining it, because you still remember exactly what confused you. A month later you've forgotten the hard part and your explanation gets worse. If you cracked something this week, that's a post. Nobody has to earn the right to ask a question here, but this place only works because people come back and answer them once they can. 3. Ask good questions. Specific beats polite. "How should I structure this?" gets three vague answers. "I have a 40 file client folder, the model keeps loading the wrong context file, here's my CLAUDE.md" gets a real one. Say what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead. A more in depth guide: https://dontasktoask.com The flip side of this: "Anyone here?", "Help please", and one line questions with no context may get removed. Not to be harsh, but because nobody can answer them. 4. Give credit. If you built on someone's skill, template, folder structure or comment, tag them. It costs you nothing and it's the reason people keep publishing their work here instead of keeping it. A lot of the best material in this community started as somebody's reply on somebody else's post.

It’s live. Starting today, everyone in Clief Notes has access to the new Clief Notes AI. The easiest way to use it? Don’t overthink it. Ask it the question you would normally ask me. “Where should I start?” “What should I focus on next?” “Where did you talk about [topic]?” It’ll use what’s already inside Clief Notes to help answer you and point you toward the right lesson or resource when there’s something worth going deeper on. The goal isn’t to give you another AI tool to play with. It’s to make everything already inside this community easier to actually use. If you want Access to it Comment "READY" and we'll send you access to it!

Rebuilt my ICM setup again, mostly because of Opus 5. This time the rules do not sit in documents. Wrote here twice before about this. It started with Opus 5. That one was by far the worst, it barely did what I asked and it ignored my own rule files completely. The other 5 models changed too, but Opus 5 is where it fell apart for me. First post I asked if others saw the same. Second post I said I had it fixed by rewriting all my rules in calmer language. That second post was too early. It ran well for a few sessions and then it was skipping rules again that it had read back to me two messages before. So I stopped rewriting rules and went looking for why it happens at all. What I learned is that a rule in a document is not a setting. It comes in like a message, and the model decides for itself whether it applies to the job in front of it. Getting the job done usually wins. And there is a limit to how much of it sticks, so every rule I added made the other ones weaker. That is why the same mistake kept coming back even though I had written a rule against it. On top of that, the one script I had that was supposed to block anything before my start steps were done turned out to have never run at all. After that I took the whole setup apart and sorted every rule by one question. Can a script check this or not. If a script can check it, it is not a sentence anymore, it is a script that blocks. If it only matters for one kind of work, it moved to its own folder and only comes in when I open that kind of file, so my script rules show up when I open a script and stay away the rest of the day. If it is a way of working I only need now and then, it became a skill that sits there as a name and one line of text until the task actually asks for it. Nothing was deleted, everything moved. The reading changed too. My big list files are not read from top to bottom anymore, they get searched. Two or three words, and only the matching line comes back. And every place where a document pointed at another document got rewritten. It used to say see file X. These models read that as a note about where something lives, not as go and read it. The older models filled that in by themselves, the new ones do not. Now it says what to do first and why.