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High Tea is happening in 5 days
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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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🇬🇧 GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON! 🇬🇧
Jake and I made it across the pond. We're here for London Tech Week all week. We got invited out for this one, which still feels surreal to type. We've got multiple pitch slots in front of investors over the next few days to talk about what we're building at Eduba and where this community is headed. Big moments lined up. Big rooms. Big swings. 🚀 If you're at the conference, DM me! Would genuinely love to meet anyone from the community in person. We'll be all over the Techscaler booth and floating between sessions. Even if it's just a hello and a handshake, hit me up. 🙏 And if you've got a second, send some good energy our way this week. We're about to walk into some rooms that could change the trajectory of what we're building. Wish us luck. Light a candle. Whatever your version of that is. We'll take all of it. Now to the real reason you're here. 👇 ---- 👇 🏆 7-DAY LEADERBOARD WINNER: @Bas Rosario 🏆 🔥 Bas just won it AGAIN. Back-to-back. Last week he won as a Premium member and we converted him to free Premium for life. This week he's already Premium for life, so we're bumping him up. ✨ Free VIP for life. ✨ The Drawing Room. High Tea. Bespoke folder builds with Jake. All of it. Forever. No charge. ---- ⏰ The 7-day clock just reset. Next Monday we crown the next winner. Could be you. 🎯 How it works: - 📝 Post bad ass stuff - 💬 Help people in the comments - 🛠️ Share what you're building, what's working, what's breaking - ❤️ Engage with other members' posts The leaderboard tracks all of it. Whoever sits at #1 next Monday wins. ---- 🎁 The prize, depending on where you're at: 🆓 Free member? You get lifetime Premium, free ⭐ Already Premium? We convert your Premium so you stop paying 👑 Already VIP? We convert your VIP so you stop paying Either way, you stop paying. Forever.
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🏆 WEEKLY COMP #7: THE OPERATOR 🏆
🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. ---- 🇬🇧 We're back. Good morning from London. 👋 Thanks for the patience last week. Jake and I needed a few days to breathe before London Tech Week kicked off, and you all responded with nothing but support. We don't take that for granted. Now let's get back to building. ---- 📋 THE CHALLENGE Build a folder-based AI operator that handles ONE operational workflow end-to-end. You pick the workflow. This week's deliverable is one operator folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use to handle a real business workflow without babysitting. ---- 🎯 PICK YOUR WORKFLOW The workflow is yours. Pick something specific. Pick something you'd actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - 🎫 Customer support triage (which tier handles this ticket?) - ✅ Content review and approval - 📨 Lead intake and qualification - 💸 Refund request handler - 🤝 Partnership pitch evaluator - 🎙️ Podcast guest pitch sorter - 💼 Freelance project intake - 📄 Resume screen for one specific role - 📅 Meeting request triage (book, decline, delegate) The more specific, the better. "Customer support" is too broad. "Refund request triage for an ecommerce store doing under 200 orders per month" is right. 📎 If you want a fully written client brief as a reference, the attached PDF walks through one example. Don't build the example. Use it as a template for how to think about scoping your own operator. ---- 🗂️ 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 operator is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who the operator is and what workflow they own) - 📐 rules.md (the decision logic: criteria, edge cases, escalation rules) - 💬 examples.md (decisions in action, including at least one edge case) - 📚 reference/ (checklists, templates, rubrics) - 📖 README.md (how to use it)
Turns out the academics are a lap behind us.
Had a call today with researchers from Stanford's Autonomous Agents Lab. They're studying AI adoption at marketing agencies. Found me via Google. I asked them how much research they did on me first, none; they were embarrassed to say they just filled out my contact form. I warned them it might not be the conversation they expect. At the end, they said I was the most advanced agency owner they'd spoken with. They'd never heard of ICM. These are smart people doing real research. They've talked to a lot of agencies. And the most common thing they see is: people using ChatGPT chat, maybe dabbling with agents, struggling to get them to do things reliably end-to-end. You all know what I've been running for the past 2 months and I showed them. Then the researchers showed me their own tool — an autonomous browser agent that can log into Google Ads and act. I told them: I don't write to external platforms without a human reviewing it first. That's a policy, not a technical limitation. My clients' $20K/month runs through my judgment, not an AI's. Human in the LOOP! Their reaction: "that makes sense." But they were clearly used to hearing "I'm trying to get the AI to do more." I'm not. I'm trying to get the AI to help me reason better. That's a different goal. My takeaway: if you're in this group and you're here honestly learning, you're way ahead, don't stop! Keep building! Ronnie Coleman once said: "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights."
ICM is awesome for one person, but what if there is two?
Been building an AI system for our agency for the last several months — custom tools, automations, outreach, all structured so the AI knows what context to pull and when. We run most of it through our own website. Found Jake's content and immediately recognized what we'd been building toward. The ICM framework — structured context over complicated multi-agent setups — we'd been doing a version of this without knowing it had a name. Here's the thing though. Everything I've seen assumes one person running the system. We're two founders. And the team layer — who owns what, how handoffs work, how you avoid overlap when the AI is already handling coordination — nobody seems to be talking about that. Just getting into the classroom so maybe it's in there. Curious if anyone's figured out ICM for a small team or if that conversation is even happening yet.
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Clief Notes
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Jake Van Clief, giving you the Cliff notes on the new AI age.
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