Today was a massive win. I had my meeting with the Head of AI for our global group, and it went beyond anything I had imagined. The Pitch: 132 Orders and a "Broken" System I had the chance to present a real-world challenge: Manually processing 132 sales orders in April. The workflow is a nightmare: Open each order, find the amount, cross-check it with an Excel sheet, invoice it, and repeat. To make it worse, there is a known bug in our D365 environment where the amount column simply shows "0" in the grid, meaning I can’t just export a list. It requires manual clicks. In a busy finance department, this takes days because of constant interruptions. I presented my workflow and explained how this concept isn't just for one task—it’s a framework for almost every repetitive monthly task we have. I knew from my previous Rebill Project that if I can automate the "friction," I can win back my time. The Result: Skipping the Queue When I told the Head of AI that this could turn a 3-4 day job into about 1 hour, his eyes lit up. Even though Claude Code is still stuck in corporate governance (it's currently with our CEO to decide on a global rollout), he didn't want me to wait. He immediately assigned me a Microsoft Copilot Studio license. These are highly restricted—usually, there’s a long waiting list, and if you don't use it for 30 days, you lose it. He bypassed the entire queue to get me started right away. Moving the Needle with IT To get "Copilot Cowork" talking to D365, I had to submit a technical IT ticket to enable the Model Context Protocol (MCP). I made sure to CC both the Head of AI and my own manager. The Head of AI jumped straight into the ticket with this comment: "I talked to Allan today. He has an idea to speed up a process in finance and save days of work... The use of the MCP server for this would help him very much. Open for a call if needed or any other help for the team."

We've been hoarding links like digital pack rats -- and it's time to crack the vault open. Jake and I put together a running list of the tools, resources, and random goldmines we keep coming back to. The stuff that actually stuck after the hype wore off. If it survived our workflows, it earned a spot here. https://www.skool.com/quantum-quill-lyceum-1116/classroom/c7f102c7?md=59285d6b92ed425cae7f439761e26acf ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THIS IS Think of it as a curated toolbox -- not a "Top 100 AI Tools" listicle from some SEO farm. These are things we've actually used, broken, duct-taped back together, and kept reaching for. Some are well-known, some are buried gems we stumbled on at 2am while chasing a rabbit hole. WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU This page is alive. It's not a monument -- it's a workbench. - Drop a comment if something on here saved you hours (or cost you hours -- we want to know that too) - Suggest additions -- what's in YOUR toolchest that we're sleeping on? - Call us out -- if something's outdated, broken, or just not as good as the alternative you found, tell us - Share your use case -- same tool hits different in different hands. How are you actually using these? We'll keep updating this as the collective stack evolves. Your feedback shapes what stays, what goes, and what gets added next. ------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: You know the drill -- this is garage tinkering, not production gospel. Your mileage may vary. Duct-tape what works and break what doesn't. Let's keep building brains that can't be taken away from us.

One of my first goals in using all I’m learning here was to automate the monthly income statement for my (small) organic granola company. For many years my husband and I just winged much of the accounting and financial details of our business. Waiting till tax time or the end of the year to cobble together what we needed. The reports from Shopify and square worked fine. But over the past few years, we’ve put more emphasis on growing the business and i honestly hate being in the dark. My husband is ok being a little loosey-goosey - good thing we aren’t financially dependent on this! It’s still very much a side hustle but it’s our brand and we take pride in the quality and integrity of our product and love our customers. So, on to the win… Today, I did it! I set up my folders, write my .md files. Tested, iterated and eventually nailed it. All I have to do is export my revenue, my expenses and fill in a few other details regarding events we do and presto. 4 steps, pausing along the way to reconcile any flags and finally landing at a clear picture of all the numbers of our business! Plus more regarding events we do, fees and other things we want to have to make future decisions. I’m excited to run all my stages for May. This made so much click for me. This might be basic but a huge win for me!

I'm drafting a very old sci-fi novel of mine with Claude Code. Four scenes in. More excited about a creative project than I've been in years — and the reason isn't the speed. It's that the workspace is built to refuse. Setup: a folder called `writing-room`. Eight stages, from premise to compilation, each one a markdown directory the AI loads only when it's relevant. Compass, world, characters, structure, voice, writing, revision, compilation. The first rule, hardcoded in `CLAUDE.md`: > Before generating prose, always load `voz.md` and `padroes-prosa.md`. Without these two, refuse the writing task and ask the author to do Stage 05 first. Translation: the AI cannot draft a scene until I've locked in the voice. And `voz.md` was reverse-engineered from scenes I wrote by hand. The voice is mine. The AI only gets to extend it. There's also a file called `padroes-prosa.md` — 9 anti-AI-slope techniques. Verbalized sampling. Fragmentation. Character voice. Rare vocabulary. Every generated scene must apply at least 3, and the reviser uses the same file as a checklist. What this changes in practice: - I don't fight AI prose. I gate it. - Each stage loads minimum context. The AI doesn't drown in 200k tokens of worldbuilding to draft one scene. - After every scene, a `cronista` skill updates a canon file. Continuity stays cheap. - I'm the bottleneck on voice. I'm fine with that. The transferable bit, if you build with AI: The most useful thing your workflow can do is sometimes say no. Refusing to act without the right inputs forces you to produce those inputs — and that's where your taste enters the system. Without that gate, the AI averages you out. Toward the median sentence. The median plot beat. The median version of you. A friend of mine said that "in order to have a second brain, you need to have a primary working brain". I laughed: true enough. I wanted to build the gate first. Then let it write. And I'm loving it.

Had our team's quarterly planning this past Friday and I'm super excited that they're gonna join Clief Notes to go through The Foundations course! Jake is such a rare find and there's no words that can express the gratitude. But we sometimes forget that gratitude can be expressed via actions, and I'm telling anyone who's willing to hear about Clief Notes. Even got my son in there LOL! Out of all my kids, he's the one with the most interest and his brain is best wired to dive into a community like this.