***A note before you read: this post talks about losing a parent to drug overdose, addiction, and some of the harder parts of growing up through that. If any of this hits close to home, take care of yourself first.*** This is personal, not ai related but feel its important to share. Both @Matthew Creamer and I lost our fathers to drug overdoses. I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because it's the kind of thing that rewires your entire life and I think some of you need to hear that the people building this thing with you know what it feels like to start from somewhere broken. My dad was a good man. I need you to know that before anything else. He was loving, he was present, he was the kind of father who wanted his son to never have to grind through the kind of work he did. He spent his life in construction, the kind that wears your body down year after year, and he always told me he wanted something different for me. He wanted to retire the whole family one day. He wanted to leave a mark on the world and he wanted me to do the same. He just had his demons, and one night when I was 15 they took him from me. A month after my birthday so I was still basically 14 years old and I found him on the couch and that was it. Everything after that moment I had to figure out on my own. I learned how to trim my beard without him standing behind me in the mirror. I learned how to haggle with taxi drivers in countries he never got to see. I broke my heart for the first time and had nobody to call who could tell me what that kind of pain actually means when you're young and don't know who you are yet. I fell into addiction myself somehow escaped after a lot of battles. I joined the Marine Corps and that brought its own tragedies, its own weight. I climbed the tallest mountain in Europe. I walked across the grand sands of the Middle East. I have tasted war and peace, depression and anger, and so much more that I am still learning how to carry.

Welcome to Clief Notes. Here’s where to start. 👋 You don’t need to watch the entire classroom before trying something. Pick a starting point, make something small, and bring your questions back here. 🧭 Find your way around Navigating the Course shows you what’s here and how to get around. If you’re new to working with AI, start with The Foundation. We work through prompting, context, and organizing your files so you can give an AI a job you can actually check. 🛠️ Never ran a coding agent or folder strcutre? Jump into Module 4 This is a good starting point if you want to work through a practical example. The short videos mix animation with actual app screenshots, and there’s a fictional practice folder you can follow along with. - 4.1: Install and First Use — Get oriented and try your first task. Grab the Foundation Practice download from Resources here. - 4.2: Working With Files — Turn meeting notes into a decision list, then check where each decision came from. - 4.3: Think, Then Build — Compare your options, choose an approach, and approve a short brief before asking for the finished work. - 4.4: Project Instructions — Leave useful instructions with your project so you have less to explain next time. - You’ll find guidance for Claude Code and Codex, plus a regular chat route where you save the files yourself. 💬 Use the check-ins At the bottom of the lessons, you’ll find polls and discussion posts. Share what you tried, what worked, and what needed correcting.

I want to hear from you. Did anything surprise you? - Something you had completely forgotten about? - A lesson that suddenly makes more sense now? - Something you originally ignored but realize is actually important? That's one of the reasons we built these roadmaps. With this much content inside Clief Notes, sometimes the thing you need isn't another lesson. It's going back to the right one at the right time. So today's check-in is easy: Comment with one thing The Archive made you rediscover. Bonus points if it's something you'd completely forgotten existed. Keep working through the quizzes and accountability posts too. We've got another unlock coming Friday.

Congratulations to @Jeff Van Leenen ! Jeff already has Lifetime VIP, so this time he gets a 30 minute 1-on-1 call with Jake directly! ⏰ The 7-day clock resets. Next Monday someone new takes the top spot. 🎯 How it works: - 📝 Post things worth reading - 💬 Help people in the comments - 🛠️ Share what you're building, what's working, what's breaking - ❤️ Engage with what others are putting out there The leaderboard tracks all of it. 🎁 The prize, depending on where you're at: 🆓 Free member? You get lifetime Premium, free ⭐ Already Premium? We convert your Premium so you stop paying 👑 Already VIP? We convert your VIP so you stop paying 💎 Lifetime VIP? Get a 30 minute 1-on-1 with Jake. Either way, you stop paying.

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.