🏆 WEEKLY COMP #6: THE RESEARCHER 🏆

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️

Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call.

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🇺🇸 Quick note first.

This post is going up Today because we took Memorial Day off yesterday. To keep things fair, you've got until Sunday May 31st at 12:00 PM EST to submit. Same week of build time, just shifted.

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📋 THE CHALLENGE

Build a folder-based AI researcher for a specific topic or industry. You pick the domain.

This week's deliverable is one researcher folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use as their personal research partner for whatever domain you've built it for.

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🎯 PICK YOUR DOMAIN

The domain is yours. Pick something specific. Pick something you'd actually use.

A few sparks to get you thinking:

🏦 M&A activity in one industry (fintech, healthcare, defense)
⚖️ Court cases in one area of law (employment, IP, immigration)
🧬 Scientific research on one health condition or treatment
🏘️ Real estate market dynamics in one city or asset class
🥊 Competitive intelligence for one product category
📜 Historical research on one period, place, or movement
📚 Academic literature in one specific subfield
📋 Regulatory developments in one sector
📰 Journalism research on one beat (climate tech, AI policy, biotech funding)

The more specific, the better. "Research assistant" is too broad. "M&A research analyst for early-stage fintech deals in the US and Europe" is right.

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🗂️ 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 researcher is a folder with five things:

📄 identity.md (who the researcher is, what domain they cover)
📐 rules.md (how they research)
💬 examples.md (what good looks like)
📚 reference/ (frameworks, source lists, key concepts)
📖 README.md (how to use it)

Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the researcher. Reusable. Shareable. Portable.

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🔥 THE ANGLE THIS WEEK

A researcher is NOT a summarizer.

A summarizer takes what's in front of them and condenses it. A researcher asks what's missing. A researcher questions the framing. A researcher weighs sources differently based on credibility. A researcher synthesizes patterns across sources instead of just reporting each one.

When someone hands the researcher a topic, the researcher shouldn't immediately produce a summary. The researcher should ask: what angle are you working on? What do you already know? What sources have you already looked at?

That distinction is the whole assignment this week. Your rules.md is where you teach the AI to investigate, not just inform. 🔍

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💼 WHY THIS LANDS ON YOUR RESUME

"I built a folder-based AI research specialist using interpretable context methodology" is a portfolio piece that demonstrates two things hiring managers actually care about: domain expertise AND systems thinking.

The skill you're learning this week is writing rules for investigative interactions. That's harder than writing rules for Q&A or summarization. It's also a skill almost no one teaches. 🚀

Win or lose, you walk out with something you'd be proud to link from your LinkedIn.

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📐 THE BAR

Someone with no context should use your folder and get a research partner that asks better questions than they would have asked themselves.

If your output just summarizes inputs, you've missed the assignment.

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📝 HOW TO SUBMIT

Drop a public GitHub repo link in the comments. Plus 2-3 sentences on what your researcher covers and what kind of work they'd be most useful for.

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⚖️ JUDGING

Jake, myself, and the mods. Four things we're looking at:

✅ Does the researcher think investigatively? Or does it just summarize?

✅ Is the domain specific enough to be useful?

✅ Does it know how to weigh sources or flag uncertainty?

✅ README quality. Can a stranger figure this out?

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🎟️ WHO CAN ENTER

Premium and VIP members only. No exceptions.

🆓 Free members watching this thinking "I could win that"? You're probably right. This week's prize is a free Lyceum seat. That's the same program biz owners pay full price to access. Upgrade to Premium and you're in the running.

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📅 DATES (UPDATED FOR MEMORIAL DAY)

⏰ Submit by: Sunday, May 31st, 12:00 PM EST

🎉 Winner announced: Monday, June 1st

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