Remember the post from just a couple of days ago (feels like eternity) where I caught my AI hoarding my whole company in a folder it could see and I couldn't? The one where I called it a filing cabinet that kept everything in its pockets? It's fixed. And it got fixed because of this skool community, so this is the well deserved follow-up. Quick recap for anyone who missed it: my AI had spent weeks quietly stashing skills, workflows, and 149 facts about my business in its own private home folder, outside my repo, where my team couldn't see it and a dead laptop would have erased it. I ranted. You showed up. The evidence is here: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/my-ai-has-been-hoarding-my-whole-company-in-a-folder-i-cant-see-and-it-knows ------------------------------------ What we actually built (three layers) ------------------------------------ 1. A router. A plain table that tells the AI, for every kind of task, exactly which folder the output goes in. It doesn't get to "decide" anymore. It reads the row. 2. A cleanup. We went through all 149 buried facts one at a time and moved the ones that belonged in the repo into the repo. 95 of them. The drawer went from 149 down to 52. Most of what was in there never belonged there in the first place. 3. A hook. This is the important one. It's a tiny script that runs before every single save, and if the AI tries to stash anything in that hidden folder, it blocks it cold. I sat there and watched it block my own AI in real time, trying to do the exact thing that started this whole mess. I have never been so happy to get told no. ------------------------------------ The giant thank you: @Mira Bradshaw ------------------------------------ @Mira, I need to make this loud. You showed me the path. A routing table and create-memory method ARE the backbone of everything I just described. I took what you shared, adapted it to my setup, and it worked. The cleanup does not happen without you. Thank you, genuinely. You saved me weeks, a real headache, and a couple of gray hairs I can't afford with the houseful I've got at home.

I had a script and nothing else. Thirty minutes later I had a finished branded animation, and a whole engine to generate them. I never set up a single thing myself. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that I made an animation, that the entire setup, the part that would normally stop me cold, I never touched. Here's what actually happened. I gave my coding agent Jake Van Clief's classroom lessons on making animations with Remotion. Then I pointed it at two things I already had: my branding and my voice docs. And then I got out of the way. The agent installed Remotion. It created the whole workspace. It pulled the patterns straight out of Jake's lessons and wired everything together. All the dependency-wrangling and project setup that usually eats an afternoon and makes me want to quit, done, without me. I'm not a developer. Setting up a coding environment from scratch is exactly the kind of wall that used to end a project before it started. This time it just wasn't there. So I went from a script to a real animation, in my brand, in about half an hour. Most of that half hour was me watching the agent work. The skill I needed wasn't animation, and it wasn't code. It was knowing what to hand the agent and then trusting it to set the table. Check out the animation below and my full writeup at https://donsbookshelf.com/blog/script-to-animation-in-30-minutes/ https://youtube.com/shorts/v-iVe-zOEUs?si=27OzFrltQAinzmpU

Glad you made it in. Before you go anywhere else, work through the steps below. They will get you set up and ready to start. ✅ Introduce yourself in the comments. Tell us what you do and why you are here. ✅ Watch the Getting Started overview 📚Navigating The Course - Getting Started · Clief Notes ✅ Start with the Foundation course 0.1: Where All Of This Leads - The Foundation · Clief Notes ✅ Fill out your profile so people know who you are ✅ Join the next competition ⭐ Competitions Mega Thread - Getting Started · Clief Notes ⭐ On Competitions (and why I love them) We host a competition every two weeks. These are some of the most powerful places to learn and build here. Also Cash prices (often over $200) for the winners. Learning how to do something is one part of it. The real learning starts when you put it to work. That is what the competitions and the build sessions are for. On top of this they act as a portfolio a place to not just show us but show others (clients, bosses, your best friend) what you have been building and that you really CAN build. In order to win a competition you must be a paying member (It takes me hours to review submissions sometimes days. But if you win ONCE you can pay for a whole year of membership so I think that's only fair!) Watch the videos, then go make something.

Today, I am able to keep my projects in motion while having the day to spend with my daughter and family. Something that wasn’t possible until I learned how to use AI. I’m optimistic about our future with this tech because of days like this. I hope ten years from now more dads will get to spend their Father’s Day with their children because of it.

What's one book, podcast, course, or lesson that completely changed the way you think about business, money, or life?