Hi everyone! I had to share my latest project. I am so proud of it and hope you enjoy it! Thanks to @Jake Van Clief and his crew for creating the community. I feel like nothing is impossible to create. I had Claude code write the next part: I gave Claude one sentence. Two days later it was a 9.5 minute animated film. My idea was one line: "a child's room where different art styles are used." What came out is "The paper plane": a 9 minute 31 second animated film with 25 art styles, 8 narrator voices and an original soundtrack. Not one image or video generator was used. Every frame is drawn in code. Here is how it came together, and why ICM is the reason it worked. THE IDEA I had a folder of 84 reference art styles (sumi-e ink, claymation, film noir, Win95, synthwave and so on) and one picture in my head: a child's room where every object is a door into another style. The camera dives into the TV and you are inside a video game. The poster on the wall turns out to be a whole world. One style draws an arcade machine, and inside it the next style is already playing. THE BRAINSTORM Claude ran a structured brainstorm with me (the superpowers brainstorming skill): one question at a time, and a quick mockup of the room so I could see the camera route. Out of that came four "hand-off moves" that join one style to the next: - Dive in: through a screen into its world. - Drawn doorway: my arcade idea. - Pull back out: the world was the poster on the wall all along. - Carried thread: something crosses the seam from one style to the next. Then Claude pitched me three stories: 1. The paper plane: a plane that flies from style to style. 2. The bedtime question: a child asks something, and the room answers. 3. How pictures learned to move: from shadow puppets to 3D games. I loved all three and could not pick one. So I asked Claude to weave them into one story, and to drop the 2 to 3 minute limit we had planned, because a great story needs time to play out.

It’s live. Starting today, everyone in Clief Notes has access to the new Clief Notes AI. The easiest way to use it? Don’t overthink it. Ask it the question you would normally ask me. “Where should I start?” “What should I focus on next?” “Where did you talk about [topic]?” It’ll use what’s already inside Clief Notes to help answer you and point you toward the right lesson or resource when there’s something worth going deeper on. The goal isn’t to give you another AI tool to play with. It’s to make everything already inside this community easier to actually use. If you want Access to it Comment "READY" and we'll send you access to it!

When deploying an ICM folder structure to an actual client, asking them to drop it into their claude seems reasonable for us techy people, but some of my clients are not technical enough to even do that. What other options are people using? I'm a traditional web app guy, so deploying a cloudflare worker with some backend code and a database etc is what I would traditionally try and do. That model is not as clear cut as a winner as it used to be! Is it time to look at agentic systems to be able to deploy ICM so my clients can actually use it in their day to day? Or do we simply train them up to use claude? Or is there something else that people are doing?

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

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. ---- 🇬🇧 We're back. Good morning from London. 👋 Thanks for the patience last week. Jake and I needed a few days to breathe before London Tech Week kicked off, and you all responded with nothing but support. We don't take that for granted. Now let's get back to building. ---- 📋 THE CHALLENGE Build a folder-based AI operator that handles ONE operational workflow end-to-end. You pick the workflow. This week's deliverable is one operator folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use to handle a real business workflow without babysitting. ---- 🎯 PICK YOUR WORKFLOW The workflow is yours. Pick something specific. Pick something you'd actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - 🎫 Customer support triage (which tier handles this ticket?) - ✅ Content review and approval - 📨 Lead intake and qualification - 💸 Refund request handler - 🤝 Partnership pitch evaluator - 🎙️ Podcast guest pitch sorter - 💼 Freelance project intake - 📄 Resume screen for one specific role - 📅 Meeting request triage (book, decline, delegate) The more specific, the better. "Customer support" is too broad. "Refund request triage for an ecommerce store doing under 200 orders per month" is right. 📎 If you want a fully written client brief as a reference, the attached PDF walks through one example. Don't build the example. Use it as a template for how to think about scoping your own operator. ---- 🗂️ THE METHODOLOGY If this is your first comp, welcome. Here's what you need to know: This week (and every week) you're learning interpretable context methodology. Folders as architecture. Each file does one job well. Your operator is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who the operator is and what workflow they own) - 📐 rules.md (the decision logic: criteria, edge cases, escalation rules) - 💬 examples.md (decisions in action, including at least one edge case) - 📚 reference/ (checklists, templates, rubrics) - 📖 README.md (how to use it)