Hi! I am finding a lot of webinars I go to use 'agents', but what it really is, is automations. Anyone else finding the same thing in their field? I work in education and when teachers talk - mostly I want to scream like that is just a workflow - that is just a scheduled task - that is not AI... and then "AI companies" come and want to sell you 'their product' and the same product is a built-in tool?

Drop him into the project you've been avoiding. He lives in a folder. Every morning at 9am he wakes himself up, checks how long your project has been sitting there, and pops up on your screen to tell you about it. Move in to a project you haven't touched in three weeks and his first words are: "i just moved in. nothing here has been touched in 23 days. the last thing was 'my-big-idea.md'. no judgment. some judgment." He names YOUR file. He counts YOUR days. Work on the project and he notices that too: "the folder moved while i slept. 'index.js', specifically. activity counts as affection. house rule." https://hubbardjoshua9-a11y.github.io/gordon-worm/GORDON.html --- He has five moods. Hopeful. Content. Peckish. Wistful. Wounded-but-dignified. Miss a few days and he goes peckish. Miss a week and you open your laptop to a slightly purple worm with drooping eyes being very brave about it. He doesn't guilt-trip. He journals about it instead, which is worse. --- His belly is an archive 🗂️ Got files cluttering your project you're not ready to delete? Drop them in his food folder and tell your agent "feed Gordon." He reads each one, has opinions, then dates and archives it out of your way. Not a bin. Still there if you need it. Just quieter. He archives them. He just doesn't do it silently. --- You can also make him talk 🗣️ Open your project with Claude Code and say "check on Gordon." He'll speak. He remembers things between sessions via his diary. He'll bring up your files by name like an old friend. --- Here's the thing though. Gordon is a fully compliant ICM build. STATE.md is the single source of truth. Nothing about Gordon is true unless it's written there. Each folder has one job and a stage contract that defines its inputs, outputs and edge cases. The diary is append-only memory the agent reads at boot. The food folder is an input gate. The belly is a write-once archive.

Yes, another post about this. Its the topic of the week. I blame @Curtis Hays and @David Vogel for this. Last night I started copying and pasting all of their and @Ari Evergreen's posts and putting them into Obsidian for easy reference. Since Skool doesn't have a save post function, I am just manually doing it now. I am just going to say at this rate each one of them is going with their amazing content, they will probably end up being their own advisors in the council... 😂

We talk about folders all day, but the folders are FOR something. I want to know what... 🎖️Bonus points: comment with the single most painful manual process in your industry. The best comp entries come from exactly those answers.

Had a call today with researchers from Stanford's Autonomous Agents Lab. They're studying AI adoption at marketing agencies. Found me via Google. I asked them how much research they did on me first, none; they were embarrassed to say they just filled out my contact form. I warned them it might not be the conversation they expect. At the end, they said I was the most advanced agency owner they'd spoken with. They'd never heard of ICM. These are smart people doing real research. They've talked to a lot of agencies. And the most common thing they see is: people using ChatGPT chat, maybe dabbling with agents, struggling to get them to do things reliably end-to-end. You all know what I've been running for the past 2 months and I showed them. Then the researchers showed me their own tool — an autonomous browser agent that can log into Google Ads and act. I told them: I don't write to external platforms without a human reviewing it first. That's a policy, not a technical limitation. My clients' $20K/month runs through my judgment, not an AI's. Human in the LOOP! Their reaction: "that makes sense." But they were clearly used to hearing "I'm trying to get the AI to do more." I'm not. I'm trying to get the AI to help me reason better. That's a different goal. My takeaway: if you're in this group and you're here honestly learning, you're way ahead, don't stop! Keep building! Ronnie Coleman once said: "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights."