Jake made a point in on of his videos that I haven't stopped thinking about: People rarely ask how the liberal arts apply to AI, even though they're often what help us navigate the fuzzy problems where there isn't a single objectively correct answer. As a computational linguist, that got my attention. Someone recently asked me if computational linguistics was "even relevant anymore." That's like asking a structural engineer if buildings are still a thing. So I'm curious: If you could require every aspiring ICM practitioner to deeply study one (or two) disciplines outside of AI and software engineering, what would you choose? Some candidates: - Philosophy - Linguistics - Psychology - History - Political theory - Anthropology - Economics - Literature - Rhetoric - Art history - Architecture - Music theory More importantly: What mental model from that field has fundamentally changed the way you build AI systems? My current research agenda consists of figuring out why Helmuth von Moltke the Elder seems to have more relevant opinions about AI execution than most LinkedIn influencers.

The way we build has been on my mind lately. Part of it was @Ruben Aguirre ’s post about memory and drift and the system getting away from him. Part of it was a conversation with @Curtis Hays. Curtis kindly gave me permission to share the following, which is all his: The frame is the one from the thread @Geoff Thilo started. Two layers everybody can see: where the work lives (the folders), and what the model can see when it acts (the context loading). There's a third nobody builds for — discipline. What keeps the first two true after the day you set them up. People conflate organizing files with keeping them true over time. They're not the same job. I keep an index of every client and which version of their brand doctrine is current. I wrote it once. Then a few weeks later I touched it once more for an unrelated change. That was it. Two edits in two months while the actual client work churned underneath it — new versions, new clients, a half-dozen files that moved. By today the index was just wrong. It froze on the day I wrote it and the world walked past it. Here's the part worth noticing. It didn't go stale because I got lazy. It went stale because nothing in the system owned keeping it current. No rule, no gate, no step that said "when a doctrine file changes, the index re-derives." I went looking — there was nothing. It was a hand-built snapshot with no maintenance contract attached. An artifact like that was always going to freeze. The only question was how fast. So that conversation from Curtis got me thinking. I build a lot slower than some people in here - and I’ve already tagged two of them in this post. Part of that is because I spend time worrying about what Curtis calls the discipline. I stop and think about the boring stuff when I build. How is it going to get maintained? Does the skill force it or suggest it? I run a fortnightly reflection for my personal system. For my work one, I run a weekly sweep *and* a fortnightly reflection. I think the discipline is important enough that I baked a version of this into a competition entry in here - adjusted from my own practice to suit use by someone who is not a builder and stop the system from disintegrating over time.

This will tell you a lot about the future and the way I think, give it a read if you have time. https://jakevanclief.substack.com/p/the-machine-is-smart

Not long ago I had absolutely no background in programming. I started learning out of pure curiosity after discovering AI and realizing how powerful these systems were becoming. At first everything felt overwhelming syntax, debugging, concepts I had never seen before but I kept showing up every day and building small projects. Fast forward a few months later, after countless hours of learning and experimenting, I managed to land my first role as a Junior AI Engineer. The journey wasn’t easy, but it proved to me that with consistency and the right resources, changing careers into tech is actually possible. I'm curious, has anyone else here made a similar transition?

You built an agentic OS. So did the person three seats over. And when you put your architecture next to theirs, the shapes rhyme. Folders for clients. A governing layer up top. Named agents doing scoped work. An orchestrator routing it all. That's not a coincidence and it's not theft. It's convergence. Builders with no access to my internal architecture keep arriving at doctrine I already wrote down. One builder reasons their way to belief over prompting. Another builder names an agent and discovers that's the hook for giving it a soul. And another builds a routing gate to protect the signal. Different vantages, same destination. None of them copied me. They solved the same problem in their own org and ended up in the same place. I used to find that mildly surprising. Not anymore. Because if a stranger reinvents the doctrine without ever seeing it, the doctrine isn't clever positioning I invented. It's just how this actually works. Convergence is the proof that it's true. Which tells me the map was never the moat. If people can rebuild a system from a screenshot of a folder tree, then handing over the clean version costs me nothing and proves the point. So here it is. An outline of the AgencyOS map is attached to this post. Layers, agent roster, sample folder structure, and tool integrations. Take the shape. Start at Layer 1, not Layer 3. The agents are the fun part, so that's where everyone wants to start. The leverage is upstream. The belief layer governs everything the agents produce. Mine didn't come from a build sprint. It started forming in late 2023, with these ideas spoken aloud on a podcast, before any AI was in the picture. Then I spent over a year encoding that conviction into a system. Then I found ICM and ported it over. I'm still refining it. An agent I can spin up in 15 minutes. The belief layer took years because it had to exist before the machine did. Build the workforce on top of nothing and you get a fast machine with no conviction. And the belief layer is the one thing on that map you can't take from me. I can't take yours from you. You can copy the folders. You can copy the agent names. But you cannot copy what I believe into your system. I can go into my AI and ask it "what do I believe?" and it returns my truth. If you load my doctrine and ask the same question, you get what I believe. Not what YOU believe.