@Bas Rosario Class 1 (the anatomy of a loop - Loop Engineering) is the most useful thing I've used in here this month. I can show you why, because I ran it on something real the same day. I had a positioning sentence for my trades program with one part still open: why they'd pay. (The sentence structure is @Jake Van Clief . I got it in the Lyceum as part of the course) My Why just repeated another part of the sentence, and I had already approved it by feel. That's the bad loop Bas describes. A mood, not a loop. So I did what the lesson says. These 4 lines from it did the work. 1. "Evaluate needs three things: the output, the standard, and nothing else." Claude wrote 8 pass or fail checks before drafting a single Why. Round 1 was 8 Whys and all 8 failed, including the one I had approved the day before. 2. "Pass or fail, no scores." My favorite in round 2 would have scored well. It failed one check, because the research says owners trust another owner's story more than a number. So it was out. 3. "The carry is one line: what failed, and what to change." Every round started from what the last one got wrong. Round 3 passed 7 of 8. 4. "If you catch yourself judging something that is not on the list, that judgment is a missing check. Add it, or admit it is yours to keep." This is the one I would have missed without him. Round 3 passed and I didn't like it. It was too small, and "big enough" wasn't on the list. So I kept that one as mine, said what I wanted, and ran one more round. That one passed. Before: they'd pay because it's "the simplest system that works". After: "They would pay for it because they went out on their own to work for themselves, not for the office, and every fix we finish with their own people and tools gives a piece of that back." What makes the lesson so good is that you can use every part of it the same day. Bas says nothing in it is clever and everything in it is written down. He's right, and that's why it worked on the first try.

So, starting completely from scratch... The first thing I did was actually not build anything. 😄 I looked around. I started with the Classroom, specifically Getting Started and the first lessons of The Foundation. If you are completely new here, go and do that. It’s time well spent. Then if you want come back here. When I approached Module 4 in The Foundation I had a few questions. Mind you, at the time it was not as nicely organised as it is now. It has improved. Thank you @Jake Van Clief Anyway, the questions appearing in my head went something like this: How do I pick the right folders? Where do these .md files come from? Do I write them? How would I know they have everything inside them that my project needs? What even is my project? Can I have multiple CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.mdfiles? Where is my real folder root? Do I have multiple projects in the same folder? Can I add more stuff later?... Sound familiar? 😄 In the end, it all boiled down to one question: How are people actually doing this? 🔎 So I stopped the Classroom for a while and the search bar became my best friend. The more I searched and the more I looked around, I slowly but surely figured something out: There seems to be more than one way of building an ICM. Some members loaded Jake’s & David's ICM material/research paper into their LLM of choice and built from there. Other members started with the icm-architect skill. Others did a combination of both. And yet another group used the icm-architect together with something called the Workspace Blueprint. The bottom line for me was: ❗Many roads lead to Rome. Pick one. ❗ While combing through the group with my best pal, the search bar, I also came across some really interesting videos and posts which helped clear things up for me. Some were easy to find. Others were hidden away somewhere in the dusty abyss of the Skool community posts. 😄 In hindsight, I think searching around for a while was actually very useful. It helped me connect the dots and, more importantly, stopped me from immediately jumping into building something without really knowing what I wanted.

If you opened this post, you might already have a very strong opinion about it. Let's be honest, it is practically every where (and I know I resort to it often). I was going to write a different post all together, when it occurred to me that it sure serves a section of humanity who has lost their voice, and who want to put content out. I wrote an opinion about it - https://thequietai.com/writing/say-whats-synthetic.html Though a poll is far more fun -

I was invited to sit on a panel this morning: "AI in Action: The Mindset Behind the Moves," at Auxiom's Community Appreciation Event, attended by 120 business leaders in Detroit Metro. Grateful to Founder and CEO Matt Loria for the invite. Auxiom is a local IT and cybersecurity company. Before the panel, Ashok Sivanand (Nous) ran the room through a workflow-redesign workshop. He opened with a stat from McKinsey: 80% of companies doing generative AI work saw no change in profitability. He paired it with another: only 1 in 5 companies had actually redesigned a workflow before pointing AI at it. Same 1 in 5, both times. He called it a coincidence. This is similar data I referenced in David's Corner, The Tool is 10 Percent. His worksheet was amazing though: name the constraint, name the workflow, name your customer, find the leak, pick one fix, run a 30-day experiment with a guardrail and a report-back date. His line on the handout: diagnose before you prescribe. All 120 execs walked out of that room with a real next step; that's rare for many speakers. On the panel, I got to talk about an idea I've been writing about here: AI does two different jobs. It's good at mining your own record for what's already true, and it's good at amplifying whatever you give it. Skip straight to amplifying, and the output sounds like everyone else's. Someone asked what my own transition looked like, going from a 12-person team to running alongside 20-plus specialists. Two years chasing tools before I found ICM. Two weeks after that, I converted all my unstructured data into structured markdown and built my routing map and orchestrator, Duke. After, a CIO on the panel asked me how I was able to orchestrate across 50k markdown files. I said, "Simple: a map, and dropped Jake Van Clief and ICM as the solution." The closing session was Aaron Salko and Kelly Johnson on human performance. A line I wrote down: "Technology creates capability; human performance determines the outcome". If you've got performance gaps today, AI doesn't fix them. It multiplies them across more people.

I think I have 30-40 hours left of Fable access. My usage has just ticked over to 56% used. I had enough of a build queue that I decided to upgrade my plan just for this month and the Fable-in-subscription window and honestly, it's already been worth it. How those tokens have been spent: - 5% used to complete a system recarve and hardening pass - 35% used to orchestrate a full substrate port (from NotePlan to Notion) *and* a full branch that is future compatible with that state ready to switch to on Friday assuming this week on Notion goes as planned (oh and a full school comms rewrite to go with my brand new gmail set up exclusively for my system to access). I didn't have to build a thing in Notion - Sonnet dispatches did the lot. - 5% used to build the work order stage of my construction crew - 11% used to build the orchestration, build oversight and dispatch stage of my construction crew (and a massive shout out to @Ari Evergreen - I forked Pushing Dispatch_ and that helped me keep this to 11% of Fable orchestrating, otherwise it would have been more) Every stage of the construction crew has been pushed through a live run of the step before it in the chain to produce the document that guided the build. For the work order stage, that meant a PRD from the first stage and a build spec produced by the second stage. For this orchestration, it meant that I had fully sliced work orders, mapped to my schema, clustered to work packets that made sense. 8 stages; that were able to run in an orchestration-style mode (on Fable, I would not have let Opus go like that to be honest) and I came back to high quality work, measured to my own rules and standards and only a few small tweaks that didn't require substantial rework before committing. Honestly, the fact that something of this scale could be overseen with only 11% usage feels like a real testament to the whole chain here. I mean... this is really something. That means I still have 44% of my Fable tokens to go and only 30-40 hours to spend it in... and now we see how much of it I can use before I lose it... Wish me luck.