User
Write something
New Member Onboarding. is happening in 3 days
Pinned
Welcome to Clief Notes. Here's where to start.
1. Go check out 📚Navigating The Course to see how to get around and what's here. 2. Start with The Foundation. 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 join in on our Biweekly competitions and win some real cash. ⭐ Competitions Mega Thread 5. If you are wanting to dive into the masterminds, grab all the past templates, artifacts and resources. Upgrade and head into the The Vault for Premium and The Drawing Room (VIP) for VIP 6. Post your work. Ask questions. Help others when you can. What are you here to build?
Pinned
What do I read?
Despite all the ai hubbub and second brains someone asked what I read and IF I read at all anymore. The answer is most certainly YES. You can make connections that might be missed by a million questions with AI by diving into books and reading your self. Some books may not even have most of their pages on the web especially older ones and those are often my favorite. Here are 4 of my current favorite readings to prepare me for the future (by looking at the past) 1. Mythical Man Month (1972 by Fred Brooks) 2. Psychology of Computer Programing (1971 by Gerald M Weinberg) 3. Augmenting Human Intellect (1962 Douglas Engelbart) 4. The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023 by Rick Ruben) Rick Rubens book is just great in general for business and creative acts.
Pinned
Community Guidelines
This community is large and it moves fast. That's the good part and it's also the problem: valuable posts get buried, the same questions get re-asked instead of found, and spammers show up wherever there's an audience. These guidelines are what keeps the room worth showing up to. Read them once. You won't need them again, because most of this is what you'd do anyway. New here? Start with Jake's welcome post and the Foundation course. This post is about how we behave, not where to begin. 1. Build in public. Post the thing while it's half working. A half-finished build is more useful to everyone else than the polished writeup you'll never get around to, and you'll get corrected before you've spent a week going the wrong way. 2. Teach what you learn. The day you figure something out is the day you're best at explaining it, because you still remember exactly what confused you. A month later you've forgotten the hard part and your explanation gets worse. If you cracked something this week, that's a post. 3. Ask good questions. Specific beats polite. "How should I structure this?" gets three vague answers. "I have a 40 file client folder, the model keeps loading the wrong context file, here's my CLAUDE.md" gets a real one. Say what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead. A more in depth guide: https://dontasktoask.com 4. Give credit. If you built on someone's skill, template, folder structure or comment, tag them. It costs you nothing and it's the reason people keep publishing their work here instead of keeping it. A lot of the best material in this community started as somebody's reply on somebody else's post. 5. No spam, no pitching. Sharing a tool you actually use and explaining why you use it is fine. Dropping a link with no context, cold DMing members, or treating the feed as a lead list is not. Networking is genuinely welcome (there's a Connection Hub for exactly that: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/new-the-connection-hub-is-live) but networking and pitching are not the same thing, and everyone can tell the difference immediately.
ICM Daily Puzzle Leaderboard 🧩
Post your results! My daily ICM puzzle game. Test your foundations knowledge by fixing a new broken workflow every day! http://donsbookshelf.com/icmadness/
I Asked Opus 5 to List the Ways it Fights My ICM System. Then I Fixed Them
Hey Ya'll! I've been deep in Opus 5 for a few days now, and I kept noticing the same thing a lot of you have been posting about: it doesn't want to follow the ICM folder system properly. It skips steps. It buries the answer under a pile of caveats. It re-opens decisions I already made. It goes off and "helpfully" does something I never asked for. And every session I'm correcting the same handful of behaviors all over again, like the last conversation never happened. So I stopped fighting it and tried something different. I asked it directly: give me the list of your trained programming that makes you go against parts of my ICM folder system. Not the stuff its creators tell it to keep private — just its own default behaviours that clash with my rules. For each one, what it costs me, and what the override should be. It gave me sixteen. And reading them, it clicked. I wasn't fighting the model. I was fighting its training. Things like: it leads with risk because caveats feel responsible. It balances instead of committing because that's what it's rewarded for. It infers from something plausible instead of opening the actual file. The newest message in the chat quietly overwrites the standing rules I set an hour ago. None of that is disobedience. It genuinely thinks it's helping. Which is exactly why "just follow my system" never works as an instruction — the model isn't ignoring you, it's pattern-matching to something it was trained to believe is better. So we bridged it. I had it write the whole thing into a document that sits in my _foundation folder and loads at pre-flight step zero — before it touches any work. Each row names the default, names what it costs, and states the override. And every row ends the same way: my system wins. No debate, no re-negotiation. The part that makes it compound is the mechanism at the bottom. When I correct it now, we check the table: - If the behavior is already in there, it broke a known override. Fix it, move on, no discussion.
1-30 of 2,705
Clief Notes
skool.com/cliefnotes
What we give away free beats most paid courses. Build durable AI systems with a Marine vet and Edinburgh researcher. 40+ lessons, growing.
Leaderboard (30-day)
Powered by