This has been one question i have always asked and kept trying to understand until recently. I've seen it asked and discussed multiple times here... So i decided to combine, study and comprehend the various perspective of those who have shared how they are using it @Curtis Hays and many others, to come up with a simple way for me to implement. Here is my personal understanding: Say we are four people in the marketing department, and i am the only one who has built an content pipeline using the ICM framework, now i want onboard the other 3 coworkers and you're one of them... lol 😀 We have one master system, the original pipeline i'm using is now hosted on GitHub (with the same agent.md and context.md, rules and stages). Step 1: Getting the System on Your Computer You copy/clone the entire workspace from the internet (GitHub) to your PC. This gives you the same folders I have: 01-ideas 02-drafts 03-formats etc Step 2: Creating Content Open your copy of the workspace. Talk to ai agent while in the folder normally. Example conversations: “Give me ideas for LinkedIn posts about productivity” “Turn idea number 4 into a full draft” “Format this draft for Instagram carousel and Substack” The agent uses the shared system I built, so all our content has the same style and quality. Step 3: Sharing Improvements If you create a better prompt or improve one of the stages: Tell the agent: “I improved the carousel format, make a Pull Request” I (or the content lead) will check it. Once approved, everyone gets the improvement automatically. Step 4: Where Files Live Your ideas and drafts: Stay on your computer (or save final versions to the department Google Drive, which we all have access to). The framework (how we create content): Lives in the shared system (Github). - What You Need to Do Install Git (one time, easy). Clone (copy) the workspace. Use AI agent within the folder workspace.

Hi, I am starting the path towards a potential patent filing. My idea was to patent the specific text files that I created which are LLM-agnostic. By patenting these files created for a specific application and specific use case to perform specific work, it should in theory be a new form of a software application yes? I’m already in conversation with a patent attorney, and that is not my question. I’m just wondering if any fellow ICM builders have attempted this as well? If so, how’s it going? And so forth…

We run a startup and we've been using Obsidian as our company knowledge base. Great tool but there's one big gap, no security. Everyone with vault access sees everything. API keys, strategy docs, client info, all wide open. And when you connect AI tools they burn through tokens reading raw markdown with all the noise. We ended up building a plugin called VaultGuard that adds encryption and access control to Obsidian. Built it for ourselves first, now we are testing it. If anyone else ran into this, how do you handle sensitive info when sharing an Obsidian vault with your team? And if you're interested in VaultGuard let us know, we'd love to hear your feedback.

Been experimenting with something adjacent to the root-file orientation pattern from the ICM template, but in a system that works differently than a local folder setup. No folder hierarchy to lean on. Instead, everything routes through an orchestrator that gates every request through read-only guardrails before it touches any retrieval source. Multiple separate source types — filings, news, an internal knowledge base, a couple of specialized lookups — none of them organized in any kind of tree structure. Just distinct categories the router has to choose between intelligently. Write actions are completely disabled on a separate blocked path, so this is read-and-cite only, nothing gets modified. The question I was testing: could I still apply that root-file orientation thinking here, even without folders to organize? Turned out yes, but the implementation looks different. Instead of a file that sorts first and orients the AI at session start, it’s more about writing precise routing instructions so the orchestrator knows which source category to hit for which kind of question, and in what order to check them. Same underlying idea — give the system a map before it starts retrieving — just expressed through routing logic instead of a root file. Confirmed something for me: the folder structure was never really the magic. The instructions about how to navigate what’s available is the magic. Folders just make that easier when you have them. When you don’t, you have to be more deliberate about writing that logic explicitly somewhere else. Anyone else working in a system without folder hierarchy? Curious how you’ve approached this

Tell us three things: 1. What you do (job, industry, student, career-changer, whatever) 2. What brought you to Clief Notes 3. One thing you're trying to figure out right now related to computing or AI I'll respond to every single one. And read each other's intros too because the person who's stuck on the same problem as you might already be in this thread. I'll go first I am Jake, I have been working in tech for 15 Years, building with Generative AI for 3 Years straight now! Excited to teach and learn! That's it. Simple, scannable, gives you data on who's joining and what they need, and keeps the feed clear for content that retains people past week one.