Yesterday, my colleague Tom and I walked through our ICM. This is the zoom-in on one piece: orchestration. The piece you can actually build. Here's where it started for us. We built a brand voice document for a client. Interviewed their customers, their stakeholders, their competitors. Produced a beautiful PDF. Then I had a real thought: now every time we write content for this client, do I have to run it past Tom? We have around 30 clients on retainer. Every social post, every page, every email would need to pass through someone who understands the why behind the messaging. That doesn't scale. And the alternative is worse. The document just sits in a filing cabinet and never gets heard from again. Doctrine that isn't enforced is dead. A lot of us in here are deep on prompting and agents. Orchestration is the layer I had to figure out next, so I want to share how we landed it. It matters because the whole company has ChatGPT now. So does every client. Everyone is typing "write me a blog post" with total disregard for the truth document. Disconnected, sometimes working against the brand. For a 5-person company that's a headache. For 5,000 it's chaos. We call it the "chaos tax" that companies pay by letting their AI run amok. The fix isn't one mega-prompt that does everything. It's an orchestrator that routes and frames. Mine is named Duke. When I ask for something, Duke doesn't say "I need to do copywriting." Duke says "I'm going to pass this to Cash," which is really just loading Cash's instructions. Then Cash asks: am I writing for Curtis, the firm, or a client? Now load the context for the task. The orchestrator routes and frames. It does not do the work. Underneath Duke sit specialists. Each one is a folder with its own instructions, voice, guardrails, and knowledge. Each has a soul, a founding conviction and a wiring (I use MBTI and temperament). Cash writes copy. Scout runs SEO. Trace handles data. Ruby builds front-end, informed by a designer with 20-plus years of experience. They share one foundation, the same orientation, but each brings a specialty.

The past few weeks I've been heads down working on a server that uses models to match Anthropics Opus models, for accuracy and agentic ability. I used recent research "break throughs" to test the weight of research claims by using local models like Kimi 2.6, Deepseek V4, Gemini, Qwen and a couple others and directly hitting the APIs. I've built a CLI harness to connect to this server to have the ability to use this server agenticly on my projects. I'm very surprised by the results. I've wrote a lot off very complex tests to compare my server against 4.7 xhigh (I haven't ran against 4.8) and I tried to get 4.8 to trick my server. (I take this with a grain of salt but 4.8 had a difficult time tricking my server.) Well, I'm very pleased to say. My server that I've named Quorum, performs exceptionally well. And I'm working on making this my primary driver for using AI. Instead of ~$2/ million tokens. I'm paying around 5-10 cents and getting the same quality. The best part is that ICM is the foundation of my orchestration layer. And the speed is impressive. To save money and still get the same power. At the moment, I have opus 4.8 delegate all of its work to my server. And 4.8 just checks the work and tests the work 😜 I'm super excited about this and just wanted to share! Thanks all!