ICM Research Paper · Clief Notes

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ICM Research Paper

For those of you who enjoy the academic side of things, here is the current draft of the research paper I am writing that supports my "Folder" methodology in much greater detail. And for those of you who don't just copy and paste the paper into AI and have it explain it to you ha-ha.

The core idea is simple. Instead of building complicated software to coordinate AI agents, you use folders and plain text files.

Each folder is a step in your workflow.

Inside each folder, a markdown file tells the AI what to do at that step.

The AI reads the right folder at the right moment, does its work, and drops the result where the next step can pick it up. You review the output at each step and edit anything that needs fixing before moving on. The whole thing runs on your computer with no special infrastructure.

For the technical readers:

the paper traces this back through Unix pipeline design, Parnas's information hiding, multi-pass compilation, and literate programming. It formalizes a five-layer context hierarchy (identity, routing, stage contracts, reference material, working artifacts) and reports on practitioner findings from this community, including the U-shaped intervention pattern several of you have seen in your own workspaces. It also lays out future directions around semantic debugging and output provenance that I think will interest anyone building complex pipelines.

Feedback welcome, especially from those of you running your own workspaces.

[2603.16021] Interpretable Context Methodology: Folder Structure as Agentic Architecture

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