Context: My company is hell-bent in still making excel work for everything. 10-15 worksheets inside one file, THOUSANDS of rows and columns per sheet. Curious question, do agents follow the same ICM principles when you point them at an excel file? Ex. Routing logic in first worksheet so the agent knows where to go instead of searching the entire workbook for something.

Been heads down on something the past month plus. Not a lesson, nor a Tea round but more like the layer under all of it. Kept seeing the same thing in comments and onboarding calls: People not knowing where to even start or if something’s already been covered somewhere in here. We're working on fixing that. Not ready to put it in your hands yet.

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. 📋 THE CHALLENGE Build a folder-based AI diagnostician that reads something broken and tells you WHY it's broken. Not how to fix it. Why it failed. This week's deliverable is one diagnostician folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use to figure out why something in their world isn't working. 🎯PICK YOUR DOMAIN The domain is yours. Pick something specific. Pick a failure you've actually seen happen. A few sparks to get you thinking: - 📉 Why a landing page isn't converting - 📧 Why cold emails to a specific buyer aren't getting replies - 📋 Why a product spec keeps getting pushed back by engineering - 📄 Why a resume isn't getting callbacks in a specific industry - 🚪 Why users drop off at one step of an onboarding flow - 💸 Why a pricing page isn't converting trials - 🎥 Why a YouTube video underperformed the channel average - 🤝 Why a sales deal stalled after the demo - 📱 Why an app's retention craters in week two The more specific, the better. "Diagnoses marketing problems" is too broad. "Diagnoses why cold emails to enterprise IT buyers get opened but never answered" 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 diagnostician is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who the diagnostician is, what they diagnose) - 📐 rules.md (how they diagnose: what they look at, how they separate cause from symptom) - 💬 examples.md (2-3 example diagnoses showing the reasoning) - 📚 reference/ (common failure modes, diagnostic frameworks, benchmarks) - 📖 README.md (how to use it, what to feed it) Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the diagnostician. Reusable. Shareable. Portable. 🔥 THE ANGLE THIS WEEK A diagnostician is NOT an editor. Last comp was The Editor. That one critiques craft. It looks at a draft and says "this part is weak, go fix it."

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.

Opus 5 seems to be prioritizing solving problems than following instructions. Sonnet, Opus 4.7 and 4.8 (medium) followed my ICM structures perfectly but this 5.0 (high) is doing its own thing. Like yesterday, i pointed it to my ICM structure cold and asked for the usual updates; but instead of routing, it used grep to search.🤷‍♂️ Might seem like a small thing, but it threw me off. I know they’re non-deterministic by nature, but isn’t that what the ICM architecture for? I hope this is an isolated incident and it’d be best if the fault was mine. But is there anyone here who experienced the same thing with Opus 5? PS Glanced upon a couple of “escaped from sandbox” articles recently so this might be bias on my part.