This is a little bit of a rant cause I can’t post these thoughts anywhere else. At least, I’m not ready to get publicly crucified yet, so… I cannot talk to almost anyone I know about ai. They have no idea what’s going on, or about the kind of stuff we do. It’s all doom and gloom. There is something that really bugs me about it, beyond the naivety and half-glass-full mentality. It’s that, gatekeeping does nothing for humanity and is a selfish mentality at its core. So ai has access to lots of data, and artists data. So what? If you’re really good, it doesn’t matter. Great products, great services, great talent all have one thing in common which makes them in-demand. They’re great. And greatness is witnessed by all the people who consume their work. There’s no gatekeeping because it’s literally on display. From Harry Potter to Michael Jordon, Disney to Taylor Swift, Steve Jobs to Crayola Crayons. If no one is trying to copy you, then your work isn’t loud enough. Either because it’s not good enough (yet), or because you’re hiding it away from the world out of fear. Bringing it full circle… Nobody lost money cause I finally had a tool that could do work for me for free. Rather, everyone in my companies will literally make more money because of massively efficient operations. It also means we’ll be able to afford remarkable talent with the extra profits we bring in due to that efficiency. I’m SO glad I have more options to take care of the people I bring into my sphere. One last thought… a little side quest here.. Whenever I ask people about why it isn’t a good thing that robots will be able to farm all the organic food we need at extremely low costs to produce compared to what we have now, no one has a good answer. I used to be of the mindset that really rich people should use their money to fix problems like world hunger. Then I actually looked at the challenge of getting the recipients to use money the way it’s intended, and crunching numbers to see how long they could solve it for, and full stop, it doesn’t work. Complex problems require complex solutions. A billion dollars solves world hunger for how long… a day? A week? A month? And then what?

This week, my token usage jumped, and the quality of responses plummeted. Then, I started asking directly if it read and/or followed the folder's Cluade.md and Context.md. I've attached the response. Anyone else having this problem? —edit (IMPORTANT)— Impossible to know for sure, but my research/testing over the weekend strongly suggests an update to Claude desktop last week likely raised the temperature at which Co-Work sends your requests to the Claude API, so it gets loosely-goosey with your folder structure’s governance (to the point of ignoring most of it, regardless of model, regardless of how strict the wording). If you need more deterministic/ governance-driven usage of your folder structure (=more consistent, predictable outcomes), use Claude Code, whose temperature set to 0.0 by default for maximally deterministic coding. If you want more creative/interpretive/random outcomes, go with Co-work.

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. ---- 🇺🇸 Quick note first. This post is going up Today because we took Memorial Day off yesterday. To keep things fair, you've got until Sunday May 31st at 12:00 PM EST to submit. Same week of build time, just shifted. ---- 📋 THE CHALLENGE Build a folder-based AI researcher for a specific topic or industry. You pick the domain. This week's deliverable is one researcher folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use as their personal research partner for whatever domain you've built it for. ---- 🎯 PICK YOUR DOMAIN The domain is yours. Pick something specific. Pick something you'd actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - 🏦 M&A activity in one industry (fintech, healthcare, defense) - ⚖️ Court cases in one area of law (employment, IP, immigration) - 🧬 Scientific research on one health condition or treatment - 🏘️ Real estate market dynamics in one city or asset class - 🥊 Competitive intelligence for one product category - 📜 Historical research on one period, place, or movement - 📚 Academic literature in one specific subfield - 📋 Regulatory developments in one sector - 📰 Journalism research on one beat (climate tech, AI policy, biotech funding) The more specific, the better. "Research assistant" is too broad. "M&A research analyst for early-stage fintech deals in the US and Europe" is right. ---- 🗂️ 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 researcher is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who the researcher is, what domain they cover) - 📐 rules.md (how they research) - 💬 examples.md (what good looks like) - 📚 reference/ (frameworks, source lists, key concepts) - 📖 README.md (how to use it)

So recently I left a comment on @Curtis Hays 's live-session thread and immediately wished I'd just made it a post. The comment: "There's a lot of software engineers and highly educated tech people in this skool community and sometimes it's hard to follow just because I don't have that same level of training and education. Curtis, similar to Jake, brought it down to my level so I can understand it on the first pass." I buried it under a thank-you, it deserved its own post, aquí estamos. I'm a second-class AI citizen in this room. Not a coder. Built my company on Excel, faith, and the kind of stubbornness my wife tolerates because I bring snacks to bed at 1 AM for her and teh baby almost done growing in her tummy. This room is mostly engineers, or so it seems. I am, statistically, an extra in this movie. Or the class clown who got let in to this Harvard because brown and affirmative action. I've made peace with that. The wife is still negotiating terms as she approaches full term. What I haven't made peace with is the vocabulary you all throw around. I scanned recent posts and comments here and ranked the words that made my brain stop and Google. The Top 3, with the analogies I wish someone had handed me on day one: Orchestration 11 hits and climbing in just a few pages of posts. @Curtis Hays named his "Duke." Cool, but what does Duke do, though? An orchestrator points the AI to the floor/department/folder it needs to go to, efficiently, quickly, efficiently. It also tells the different folders/specialists you've hired how to work well with each other. Translation for the rest of us: it's the map at the mall that says you are here, Cinnabon is over there, please proceed in an orderly fashion. No judgment. I love that map. I'd marry that map (sorry, mi amor). Architecture 22+ hits. The runaway champion. Remember the mall map from #1? That only works because somebody built the mall first. That's architecture. Ari literally calls herself a Chaos-driven Media Architect, and now I get why. Her job is deciding where every room goes before anyone moves in. For the rest of us: architecture is getting really good at organizing folders, the floor plan of your house. You decide once where the bathroom is, then you stop deciding for the next thirty years. You don't tell dinner guests "my architecture puts the bathroom upstairs." You say "bathroom's upstairs, second door on the left, jiggle the handle." Same energy.

⭐ I am waiting on some feedback on this, I could be off with my read, I am willing to be wrong in public so we can all be right when we are building in private! The rules feel like they contradict each other week to week. They don't. 📍 WEEK 6 AT A GLANCE — THE RESEARCHER https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-6-the-researcher?p=fa674d82 🔬 Build: a single folder-based AI researcher for ONE specific domain (you pick). Five files, single folder — so no handoff.md and no context.md this week. 🚫 The angle: a researcher is NOT a summarizer. It asks what's missing, questions the framing, weighs sources by credibility, and asks clarifying questions before it produces. That lives in rules.md ⚖️ New wrinkle this week: judging adds "does it weigh sources / flag uncertainty?" — bake that into rules.md. 📨 Submit: public GitHub repo + 2-3 sentences on what your researcher covers and what work it's best for. 🎟️ Prize: a free Lyceum seat (pick cohort — Technical / Business / Creator). 📅 Due: Sunday, May 31, 12:00 PM EST (shifted for Memorial Day). Winner Mon June 1. Premium + VIP only. 👇—My Take Below! How the rules have read to me since my first entry and getting a bit of clarity🔮 💡There's a spine that never moves and a set of dials that change every Sunday. Once you can tell those apart, the whole thing gets a lot less stressful. ⚠️This is the post I wish I'd had before I submitted, hopefully it brings clarity to an awesome community opportunity! These competitions are like mini boot camps, the tools you take away compound. 🧩 One part to focus on is the use of: context.md 📑The lessons teach ICM with a context.md in basically every directory. Then the comp spec lists five files identity.md, rules.md, example.md, reference/, README.md, and context.md is nowhere. 🤔 So, you sit there wondering if the spec is wrong, or if you're supposed to "know better" and add it. ⚠️ Here's how I am seeing it fits. context.md is a routing file. Its whole job is navigation: in a multi-directory system, it tells the AI what lives in a given directory and where to find it. It earns its place when there's enough material that the AI would otherwise waste effort hunting.