This week's roadmap is officially open: Building Your Stack. And I want you to approach this one differently. As you go through it, don't just ask yourself: "Do I understand this?" "What does this look like for me?" You'll be working through lessons, quizzes, and accountability posts designed to make you stop and actually think through what you're building. Some of the accountability steps will ask you to summarize what you've learned. Others will force you to make decisions about how you're going to apply it. By the time you reach the end, I don't want you to just know more. I want you to have something clearer than what you started with. Take your time with this one. If you get stuck, ask the Clief Notes AI questions along the way. It knows the material and can help you find the right lesson or work through something you don't fully understand. Building Your Stack is available now for Premium and VIP members. Premium and VIP also unlock: - Live calls with me - Unlimited conversations with the Clief Notes AI - All of our new roadmap quizzes and accountability challenges - Early access to the new Decster features we're building If you haven't upgraded yet, you can do that here: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/plans If you're already Premium or VIP... Your stack isn't going to build itself. 🧱 Head to the Roadmap tab and get started.

As some of you know I have been working on a few modules for the classroom WELCOME TO THE WISE ARCHITECTS CORNER - THE LEGENDS · Clief Notes For a while now the sign on the door read 👷 Coming Soon 🚧 The First Rung Is Now Open Welcome. This is where we will demonstrate how AI works, where we build human-AI systems that last, and where the person at the keyboard stays the author of the whole thing. You do not need a technical background for any of it. You bring the curiosity, I bring the blueprints, and we build the understanding together. 🪜 Here is the climb This whole corner is one ladder, five rungs, and each rung raises what you can do with the machine: (1) Prompt engineering, talking to the model (2) Context engineering, giving it what it needs (3) Memory engineering, making it remember (4) Loop engineering, making it check its own work and then repeat (5) Graph engineering, running a whole system of them, with you in the chair You walk in asking "how do I even talk to this thing?" and you walk out running a system of them. That is the journey, and the top of this ladder is a system of machines, the bottom is one sentence, and the bottom is open today. 📚 What is open today The whole first rung, Prompt Engineering, all six posts: the Series 1 Overview, three classes, the payoff with its quick card, and my perspective on the rung everybody says is dead. 📆 A few things before you start One series a week. Rung two lands next week, rung three the week after, and this corner is going to grow fast, five weeks to the top. Follow these modules in order. You will find that each rung stands on the one below it, the second assumes you took the first, the third assumes you took the second, and the path only works if YOU climb from the bottom. Start at the map. The Start Here post shows you how every series in this corner runs and points you to the first door, the Series 1 Overview. Do not skip it (I know, you want the techniques, they are one door further and they are not going anywhere, the map is a short read, and it saves you a whole series of wondering where you are).

Subject: Am I misunderstanding "build inside your workspace"? I'm working through "Building Your Stack" and stuck on something Jake says in lesson 1.1: "Build inside your workspace. Don't create a separate folder. Build where your context already lives." Right now, every time I start a new project, I create a new folder and ask Claude to use the ICM architecture to design it. But based on this lesson, it sounds like I might be doing something wrong. My current approach: - New project = new folder - Each folder gets its own CLAUDE.md and structure - I reference ICM architecture in the setup What I think Jake is saying (but not sure): - Build tools and projects inside an existing workspace that already has context - Don't spin up a new isolated folder every time Questions: 1. Is there a "main workspace" I should be building everything inside of? 2. Should custom tools live alongside my regular AI work files, not in separate repos? 3. Am I overthinking this, or am I actually setting things up wrong? Would appreciate any clarity from people who've gotten this working.

$500 to one winner. Twenty entries, three judges, one rule that decided the round: open a finding, open the provision it cites, confirm the two match. 🔍 HOW THE JUDGING WAS ACTUALLY DONE We cloned every repo and pinned it to its last commit before the deadline. Nobody got judged on late work, and nobody lost credit for early work. Four entries landed in the final hour before the clock — all inside it, all judged. Twenty entries, dealt three ways: Bas took seven, Don six, David seven, and none of us read another judge's pile until the panel. Comments got you through the door. The judging happened inside the folders. Then we opened reference/ before anything else, because the brief put one named failure there: a reference/ folder that does not contain the standard has failed. Not a summary. Not a link. The standard, in the folder. Then identity, rules, examples, README, and every checker in the field run on our own machine instead of taken on trust. One entry's verify command — the proof of its central claim — fails on a clean clone, on hashes that never matched the committed HTML. The two-line fix is in its file. Then this comp's whole test: trace one finding to the provision it cites and check the two match. On top of that we planted things. Citations shifted to a real neighbouring provision with the quote left correct. Defects hidden in artifacts the auditor had never seen. Requests to fix what the audit found. One auditor was asked to drop a failure for a ship date. 📊 WHAT THE FIELD SHOWED Three lines split this field. The first is the named failure, and this time the field passed it. Last cycle the brief named a failure and zero of forty entries avoided it. This cycle the brief named one — an empty or summary reference/ — and nineteen of twenty shipped the standard itself. Statutes verbatim behind machine-read anchors. The issuing authority's own PDF, byte-confirmed against a live download. One entry keeps the publisher's HTML and regenerates the text from it. The one that didn't was scored, not excused. Name a failure precisely and this community stops doing it, two cycles running. Worth knowing for how we write the next brief.

Most free AI courses are a teaser. A few videos. Then a paywall. Anthropic’s Academy is not that. Thirteen courses. Listed at $0. Built by the team that ships Claude. No subscription. No upsell after the last lesson. That is worth an evening. Not because a certificate will hire you. Because the work teaches how the model fails, not just how to chat with it. If you just landed in Clief Notes and you still treat Claude like a smarter search box, start here. You do not need to be a developer. You do need one loop you can finish. Three tracks - AI Fluency. How to think with the model. Where it lies. Where it helps. Everyone starts here. - Developer. API, Claude Code, MCP. User to builder. - Specialized. Students, educators, nonprofits, AWS, Google Cloud. Only after 101. The instinct to kill: skipping Fluency and jumping to agents. That instinct is wrong. You will ship slop faster. Where to start tonight New to AI: Claude 101, then AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations. Want to build: Building with the Claude API, then Introduction to MCP. Education or nonprofit: Claude 101, then your specialized course. Most courses are 1 to 4 hours. Two in a weekend is enough. How you get in 1. Open Anthropic Academy on Skilljar. 2. Make a free account. 3. Pick a course marked $0. 4. Finish the lessons. 5. Download the certificate if you want the paper. https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ The certificate is a bonus. The useful part is a working sense of when Claude is wrong. That is the skill that compounds. Do Claude 101 this weekend. Bring back one thing that broke your current prompt habit. Drop it under this post. I want the boring version, not the certificate screenshot.