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Welcome to Clief Notes. Here's where to start.
1. Watch the intro video and introduce yourself in the intro post here 2. Start with The Foundation (free course). Concepts, folder architecture, prompting framework. Everything else builds on this. 3. Check in at the bottom of each lesson. Polls, discussion posts, other members working through the same stuff. Use them. 4. When you're ready to build real things, move to Implementation Playbooks (Level 2). When you're ready to build your own tools, Building Your Stack (Level 3). 5. Post your work. Ask questions. Help others when you can. What are you here to build?
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🏆 WEEKLY COMP #3: THE SPECIALIST 🏆
💰 $325 CASH PRIZE 💰 That's a full year of Premium. Win this and your membership pays for itself. 📋 THE CHALLENGE You just got hired again. Different client this time. Meet Sarah, a freelance copywriter who's drowning in context-switching. 📎 Download the full client brief attached to this post. Short version: She works with three types of clients (SaaS founders, ecommerce brands, local service businesses) and starts from scratch every project. She doesn't need another tool. She needs a system. Your job is to build her a folder-based AI specialist she can drop into any Claude project. The folder IS the deliverable. 🗂️ THIS WEEK YOU LEARN ICM Up until now, comps have been "build a thing." This week you utilize the methodology taught throughout the community. 🧠 Folders as architecture. That's it. That's the whole concept this week. Your specialist is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who they are) - 📐 rules.md (how they respond) - 💬 examples.md (what good looks like) - 📚 reference/ (source material) - 📖 README.md (how to use it) Drop the folder into a Claude project. Claude becomes the specialist. Reusable. Shareable. Portable. 🎯 PICK YOUR SPECIALIST Don't pick copywriting. That's Sarah's example. Pick something YOU would actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - A salary negotiation coach - A meal planner that knows your dietary restrictions - A code reviewer for your stack - A real estate market analyst for your city - A technical recruiter screener - A grant writer for nonprofits in your space The more specific, the better. "Marketing expert" is not a specialist. "B2B email expert for enterprise SaaS targeting CFOs" is. 💼 WHY THIS ONE LANDS ON YOUR RESUME Real talk. Winning a comp in a Skool community doesn't get you a job by itself. But shipping a working folder-based AI specialist with a clean README and a public repo? That's a portfolio piece.
Stop using MCP's ... mostly
OK, maybe not all of them, but for the most part you should be able to eliminate 90% I stumbled across this old blog post from the creator of PI AI (https://pi.dev/) and it's genius. It shows you how to easily remove the common web browser MCP's and replace with code. WHY ? - Because when you run executable code you no longer need to use the complex MCP queries which are typically bloat for all use cases, it simply runs the code. 1 line. What You need, not 1million users. Unfortunately it was about a week late, I could have used this a week ago as I was having trouble scraping epic-games for Unreal Engine documentation. I tried a number of different scrapers, Skill-Seekers, one I built for SEO about 5 months ago... and then decided to use Firecrawl, however I had to pay for it as it's over 6000 pages. So $36 later... https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-02-what-if-you-dont-need-mcp/ having 4-6 MCP's connected really adds some overhead. I even noticed this issue with Codex, I had to uninstall Vercel (3x bigger than GitHub), and a bunch of others. So moral of the story, keep your MCP's very light, if any at all. Even the GitHub MCP is pretty much pointless unless you're doing heavy actions / worktrees. Using 5 agents on 5 different trees. etc. If you're just doing light Push.Pull.Merge.Commits. then you don't need GitHub MCP. And after reading this post you can safely get rid of Playwright, Puppeteer, Chrome MCP Browser tools etc. All scripts can be downloaded here: https://github.com/badlogic/browser-tools
Stop using MCP's ... mostly
🏁 Foundations 1.2 Check-In
You built your first folder. Vote below, then drop a screenshot in the comments so we can see what you came up with.
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Who's here? Drop your intro.
Tell us three things: 1. What you do (job, industry, student, career-changer, whatever) 2. What brought you to Clief Notes 3. One thing you're trying to figure out right now related to computing or AI I'll respond to every single one. And read each other's intros too because the person who's stuck on the same problem as you might already be in this thread. I'll go first I am Jake, I have been working in tech for 15 Years, building with Generative AI for 3 Years straight now! Excited to teach and learn! That's it. Simple, scannable, gives you data on who's joining and what they need, and keeps the feed clear for content that retains people past week one.
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Jake Van Clief, giving you the Cliff notes on the new AI age.
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