Every time you drop a PDF or Word doc into a model, you pay tokens for formatting it never reasons over. Layout, styling, table scaffolding. None of it earns its place in the context window. So I built to-md. It turns .pdf, .docx, .pptx and .xlsx into Markdown, and writes two files: a faithful one, and a lean one stripped to the minimal text. The lean file is the one you paste in. One engine, three ways in: a command line tool, a Finder right-click action (Adds the path of the lean file to your clipboard too), and a Claude Code skill that fires the moment you hand it a document. The principle underneath it: the model should only read what it has to think about. The rest is waste you are paying for. Pre-process the document. Then prompt. //A<3

This post is not for the ICM pro, there will be no talk of gates, scripts, or orchestration! This is for the person just starting out! @Karli Rosario Yes, I mean you! (And anyone else who may just be starting out with ICM) Seriously, I'm glad you found ICM. Let me give you the simplest version of it I know. ICM is a system of structured folders. Yes, the same folders you have been using on a computer for most of your life. The ones you stored photos in, & pirated music from Napster and LimeWire. That's it. I will take you through the process below. When working with AI, a lot of people are doing this 👇 You take a long prompt, feed the entire thing to AI at the beginning of your interaction, and spend time going back and forth with AI trying to get the outcome you want. (I'm not coming for you Karli, you are exceptionally good at this, but ICM will make your outcomes exceptionally better!) What is different about AI and prompting with ICM 👇 You take that same really long prompt and instead of giving it to the AI all at once in the beginning, you break it into steps, and each step gets its own folder, each folder gets its own piece of your large prompt, just 1 step from it, and you ordered the folders by when the steps happen in the workflow. You got it? Good 😊 ❤️‍🔥 -------------------Still a bit unclear, let's bake a cake. 💡 Here's an analogy I have success with (I picked this up way back in my VB programming days): Imagine teaching AI to bake a birthday cake. 🎂 The way most people do it: 👇 One giant prompt. "Bake a cake, here's the recipe, the frosting technique, the decorating style, the candle placement..." Then they hit enter and wait. The AI is juggling 40 instructions at once, and by step 30 it's forgotten step 3. The ICM way: 👇 Break the prompt/workflow into steps. Each step gets a folder. The first folder is your first step. Then you point the AI at the first step, and the first step is 00-birthday-cake: (Point the AI just means giving access to the folders to the AI, through uploading or direct local access, don't worry about that now, let's keep building our cake.)