Hi everyone, First-time poster here. I'm looking to understand how others in the community are using the Interpretable Context Methodology (ICM) without relying on Claude Code. I've been actively building personal projects on my home setup, and every day has been a great learning experience using this folder-and-markdown architecture. However, I've hit a roadblock at work. I develop data analytics and business intelligence workflows, and we have a strict constraint: we cannot use Claude. I'm curious how others integrate Jake's ICM framework when Claude Code isn't an option. Are you using tools like Aider, Cursor, or other terminal agents BR Paul Update - Some people are already using non-Claude setup. If you could kindly explain/illustrate how you do this, I would be very grateful.

Hi community. I just Wondered whether anyone else has come across this issue: I created a complete repo using the ICM structure, it's an agency style business. I've attached a pic of generally what my repo looks like. For the first few weeks it was working really great. I was able to ask it to generate invoices and proposals and contracts and by and large it was deterministic in nature just following the instructions from the context.md files as expected. But then I started to notice a deterioration in the output. And what would happen is if I wanted to add a custom item for let's say a proposal or an invoice, it would then start updating the config files and changing the workflow. Previous templates that were set up as desired were subtly changing over time as I was making requests for particular clients or particular contracts to include particular clauses. And now I'm in a situation where I feel like I'm correcting things more than I should be and my productivity is getting impacted. It seems like the integrity of my framework has deteriorated. I'm obviously a little bit cautious and worried about having to rework my entire repo, but I'm wondering if anybody has experienced this issue themselves and what steps, if any, they have put in to create some guardrails around this. I also feel like over time it's probably helpful to have a workflow that just cleans house full of clutter and unwanted files that tend to materialize over time as I work on the business. Any ideas, thoughts, or input much appreciated. Thank you.

Back in June I tore my whole setup down and rebuilt it. Everything had been living under one folder called AI project: eight or more dated copies of my second brain from a nervous-backup habit, plus a 96 GB junk drawer holding my real coding work, about twenty Remotion projects, and my business documents all together. Disk was never the issue, I had 752 GB free. I just couldn't find anything. So when I ran ICM Architect against it, I wasn't testing the tool against a blank page. I was testing it against a pattern I'd already rebuilt into once and sanded down since. It beat that design in four places. The harness mattered more than the tool, so here it is: I walled it off in a folder outside my workspace, installed the skill project-scoped instead of global so it couldn't leak into every session, wrote down twelve yes/no predictions before running anything, and then designed the workspace myself from the same interview answers and sealed that file before the skill ever ran. What it caught that I'd missed: my real unit of work is a thread of thought, not a video. My Short had gated my long rather than the other way round, and it put that in frontmatter because a folder name can't express an inverted dependency. And it refused to invent six numbers I'd never actually stated, where my own control cheerfully filled them in. It also failed at the thing I most wanted fixed, and that failure was the most useful part. One correction to the repo, from Jake's afternoon tea session: start from a pain, not a plan. I asked myself "what repeats" first and got my idealized pipeline back. Asked "what's most annoying" instead and got a completely different, much more useful answer. That reorder changed the whole output. A tool that beats your first draft isn't interesting. One that beats your third is telling you something. Be willing to rebuild, then be willing to have the rebuild corrected. Full write-up attached, around 2,700 words: what I already had, where the umbrella form turned out to be something I'd built without knowing its name, the compare-and-contrast, what it couldn't do, and the five things I'm keeping regardless. Feed it to your AI if that's easier.

I think teaching others the little I know is the best way to learn. The more I explain it the more it gets ingrained into my thick skull. That and talking about it, doing it, practicing it. It's always a struggle for me to keep focused and often the committee likes to meet the min my head hits the pillow and starts going 100 mph discussing. I even have arguments like this anticipating what will happen tomorrow at work. LOL Anyways, I decided to start a Blog to force me to get out of my head and work this system. And once the Lyceum starts that will help me strengthen it even more. Really looking forward to it. I'm looking for feedback on my understanding of ICM. Here is one of the Blogs I posted https://johnnyleuthard.7h474hh9j9.workers.dev/blog/consistency-over-cleverness/ BYW, I used @Don Roy's website and the methods Jake showed in his tutorial to recreate a website. I told it what I wanted to keep, change and leave and within about an hour I had a site. It took a little more work get somewhere to server it but Don was great at pointing me where I need to of and Claude helped with the rest. Then I added more to my personal brand and had it apply that to the site to make it more personal and today, it's crude but a start and will get better as it goes.

Have been fiddling with ICM, Hermes, GSD, BMAD, taskMaster etc. They all sound perfect and logical on their own but feel "out of control" somehow so put it inside of ICM. I tried to make sense of them all and cook up an ICM here: .icm/ ├── CLAUDE.md # Upgrade safety gates, rollback hooks, and CLI routines ├── .icm.env # NEW: Central environment vars feeding variables to scripts │ ├── 00-gsd-wave-governor/ # CONTEXT & SPREAD CONTROL │ ├── contract.md # Rules: Blast-radius mitigation, branch naming, strict file locks │ └── active_wave.md # Tracks the current migration delta and target files │ ├── 01-discovery-and-party/ # LEGACY ANALYSES & DEBATE │ ├── contract.md # Rules: Analysis must document side-effects before code editing │ ├── codebase_discovery.md # Static analysis logs, dependency graphs, and tech debt maps │ ├── 00-party-room/ # BMAD Party Mode: "Refactor vs. Wrap" architectural battles │ │ ├── system_prompt.md # Personas (Winston/Arch, John/PM, Safety-QA Specialist) │ │ └── migration_consensus.md # Binding agreement on the upgrade strategy & fallback path │ └── 01-feedback-loops/ # Regression and breaking change post-mortems │ ├── 02-taskmaster-decomp/ # MIGRATION STEP DECOMPOSITION │ └── todo/ # Micro-tasks focused on localized refactoring steps │ └── 03-bmad-assembly-line/ # IMPLEMENTATION & REGRESSION TESTING │ ├── 01-architect-spec/ # BMAD Role: Designing code deltas & backward compatibility │ ├── 02-dev-workspace/ # BMAD Role: Executing precise, isolated modifications │ └── 03-qa-sandbox/ # BMAD Role: Core regression suite, smoke tests, validation