From a global perspective, we are all AI reward-chasing pigeons...Scurrying around with our own ideas of how to harness the power of LLMs. Everyone thinks their approach, however poorly constructed, is right. Why? It's because the reward for getting a probabilistic, nondeterministic tool to regularly output the winning answers (pigeon food) is hard but the goal posts are always moving (one day it's prompt engineering, the next its skill building, to AI agents building, to Multi-Agent builds and Agentic Workflows, all the while there are Ralph loops forgotten and recycled as just loops, now there is SDD and may ICM save us all) meanwhile Model releases change how it all works from day to day and harnesses of all flavors are sprinkled throughout (OpenClaw/Hermes/OpenWorker/Grokbot/etc) most people are left guessing, and some guessers are better than others no matter how departed from reality. This made me reflect on the Pigeon experiment I remembered learning about...in 1948, renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner published a groundbreaking study titled "'Superstition' in the pigeon" in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The study demonstrated how animals develop accidental, repetitive "rituals" when rewards are delivered completely independent of their behavior. Will we escape? Or are we doomed?

Thought everyone should know.

📣 Update (9/20/26): Comp 13 Rules Added Current Challenge: Competition 13 The Challenge 💪 - Build a folder-based AI translator that takes one kind of work and turns it into another kind of work. Same shape in, same shape out, every time. Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-13-the-translator Good luck everyone! --- What this thread is: I’ve seen a number of people either not know competitions are going on or know how to find them so here is a quick single source thread where you can get to them all. I’ll keep this updated as new challenges are released. See the current challenge as well as all past challenges below! Format for community challenges: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/how-competitions-work-from-now-on?p=84912d60 Weekly leaderboard competition: Alongside the biweekly challenges, there is a weekly leaderboard challenge where the member at the top of the 7 day rolling leaderboard wins a free upgrade to their membership. This winner is announced on Mondays typically. @Joshua Hubbard has gone another step further and created a thread linking to all competition entries. Link here: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/the-competition-archive-every-entry-every-week-every-link?p=bd752987 --- Past Challenges Competition 1 The Challenge 💪 - Build a brand voice document for a pet grooming business Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/first-ever-weekly-competition-is-live?p=90f50bf9 Results🏆 - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-1-winner-ian-barriopedro?p=0501b57e

This community is large and it moves fast. That's the good part and it's also the problem: valuable posts get buried, the same questions get re-asked instead of found, and spammers show up wherever there's an audience. These guidelines are what keeps the room worth showing up to. Read them once. You won't need them again, because most of this is what you'd do anyway. New here? Start with Jake's welcome post and the Foundation course. This post is about how we behave, not where to begin. 1. Build in public. Post the thing while it's half working. A half-finished build is more useful to everyone else than the polished writeup you'll never get around to, and you'll get corrected before you've spent a week going the wrong way. 2. Teach what you learn. The day you figure something out is the day you're best at explaining it, because you still remember exactly what confused you. A month later you've forgotten the hard part and your explanation gets worse. If you cracked something this week, that's a post. Nobody has to earn the right to ask a question here, but this place only works because people come back and answer them once they can. 3. Ask good questions. Specific beats polite. "How should I structure this?" gets three vague answers. "I have a 40 file client folder, the model keeps loading the wrong context file, here's my CLAUDE.md" gets a real one. Say what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead. A more in depth guide: https://dontasktoask.com The flip side of this: "Anyone here?", "Help please", and one line questions with no context may get removed. Not to be harsh, but because nobody can answer them. 4. Give credit. If you built on someone's skill, template, folder structure or comment, tag them. It costs you nothing and it's the reason people keep publishing their work here instead of keeping it. A lot of the best material in this community started as somebody's reply on somebody else's post.

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!