Nothing I'm about to say here, Jake hasn't already said to you in his own words. You just agreed to pay for a tool, an agency build, or an AI strategy deck described as proprietary, custom, or built specifically for you. Or maybe you're spending time and money in tokens to build it yourself. Before that invoice clears, ask what you actually bought/built. In 1999, the record industry was selling a file. Napster made that file free to copy. The industry's first move was legal, not commercial: the RIAA sued that December, an injunction landed in March 2001, Napster shut itself down that July, and by June 2002 it had filed for bankruptcy. Two and a half years, mostly lawyers, and the file had already gotten away. Software is having the same year right now. In October 2026, Kotaku's Lewis Parker reported on old games, including Halo: Combat Evolved and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, running in browsers after being pulled apart and rebuilt from the files that ship to players. Parker called it "IP protection whack-a-mole on a scale I don't think we've seen since the advent of pirated DVDs." That's 1999 again: a technology outran what rights holders could control, fast. The limit this time: it works on what ships to a customer's machine. It doesn't reach a company's own servers. https://kotaku.com/we-might-be-cooked-as-these-vibe-coded-web-browser-ports-of-halo-the-simpsons-hit-and-run-and-gta-vice-city-seem-to-work-perfectly-2000743300 Napster duplicated the recording. This makes it cheaper to reconstruct software from what has already been distributed. The techniques and legal questions differ; the economic threat is familiar. Either way, what you paid for stops being rare once a working copy exists outside your control. In McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey of 1,719 respondents, 32% said their organizations had decided against buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it with AI coding tools instead. That's a purchase avoided, not a subscription canceled. It isn't 32% of software spend disappearing, and it isn't a SaaS collapse. More than three in ten organizations are telling a researcher, in writing, that their build-or-buy answer has shifted.

Eight months ago, I started building what I thought orchestration required — N8N, Postgres, LibreChat, consulting and hosting fees. Tens of thousands of dollars. That was the right bet at the time. Nobody I saw was doing this with Claude yet. Three or four months ago, the game changed. And I didn't know it until I stumbled onto Jake's content on YouTube. Two weeks after watching "Stop Building AI Agents. Use This Folder System Instead", I have a working MCP. Client demo-ready. The whole system I was killing myself over? Markdown files and orchestration prompts. That's it. I want to give credit where it's due. Jake put something out that reoriented how I thought about AI. The investment wasn't wasted — it built the foundation. But Jake and this community pointed me toward what was actually possible now. If you're still building the complex version because you think you have to — it's worth a second look.

Found a piece of my own client work this week that had been sitting stalled for thirteen days. Fully drafted. Ready to go. It was stuck because one handoff step never happened, and nothing caught it until I stumbled on it by accident. Around the same time, I'd been asking clients a blunt question: what are you actually paying me for? AI can build the website, write the ads, draft the campaign now. Three separate conversations, no coaching between them, same answer: assurance. They're not marketers. They don't know what's happening day to day. They want to know someone trustworthy is watching it. So the plan was to automate proof. AI reads the data, drops five plain bullets into the agenda instead of a generic monthly PDF. Here's what we did. Here's why. Then I looked at why nobody caught the stalled one. I never had a name for "stuck because someone outside the loop hasn't gotten back to me" as its own thing, separate from normal waiting. Both just read as "waiting." If you can't tell the two apart, nothing will flag the difference until you trip over it by accident. If the product is "I'll make sure it's handled right," the proof of that can't be an AI summary nobody double-checks. An unchecked summary just hides the same invisible-work problem one layer deeper. When part of your process depends on a real person outside your system getting back to you, how do you tell "still waiting, that's normal" from "quietly stuck," before you stumble into it by accident? Who's actually watching for that, if you're honest? I had been disciplined about not building a UI for my ICM because I thought it was a waste of time. But now I feel like I need a dashboard for KPIs and statuses so I know what's actually going on under the hood. Anyone else running into this? And by ICM I mean my Operating System or Second Brain.

Hi Everyone! I am sure this is a fraction of the capability some of you are all delivering, but wanted to share a win of mine, being a newbie and not fully advanced in the world of ICM. First Project of mine is - A Bookkeeping agent that collects Bank Statement CSVs via its Intray, reviews and processes these transactions with guidance and mapping, and delivering a CSV output to enter into my accounting software. This is for clients who don't use accounting systems such as Xero and Quickbooks for monetary reasons, or smaller businesses who want to save on their costs. I produced this project in around an hour and am so chuffed with results, it will save me hours when it comes to smaller bookkeeping and accounts preparation work. @Jake Van Clief thank you for introducing me to the world of ICM, I can't wait to see where this knowledge takes me, and I hope in the future I can build solutions for other businesses and perhaps profit from some!

Congratulations to @Curtis Hays ! Curtis is one our OG's and he takes the lead this week! He already has Lifetime VIP, so this time he gets a 30 minute 1-on-1 with Jake. ⏰ 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.