Recently a lot of excellent community discussion around how to ICM, largely because that’s the foundation but also refocused due to @Bas Rosario’s Post on ICM as building a Cake. Having experienced rapid growth in my past, one of the hardest things to do is keep language and definitions aligned. If I say the Agent did this, where does your brain go? Lines get crossed because you have so many levels of understanding and perspective. Some people are coming from non-technical backgrounds and have learned through corporate ai marketing. Others coming from corporate environments where language is defined for them by the management and designers building their infrastructure. Mini cultures with their own language. One of the brilliant aspects of ICM is it's commonality with almost anyone on a computer. It's just a folder, from that foundation we can all get on board. What's difficult is what happens next. I had this conversation with claude during a planning session. Claude asked me did I want agents or roles? I responded back by did he mean an agent like claude or codex, which is really an LLM, a purpose built agentic piece of software that the market tells me is an agent that does stuff? Or a folder acting as an agent with a specific role. I didn't know what the underlying meaning implied, how to answer? So I asked here was the response. 1. Engine — the LLM brand (Claude, Codex, Kimi, Minimax). Raw cognition, rented capacity, the electrons. Interchangeable. 2. Agent — the ICM folder. Persistent shaped context: identity + rules + reference + memory + boundaries. A standing operator that exists on disk and endures across sessions. This is your "folders hold attention" — an agent is where attention lives. 3. Role — a lens/hat: a function performed at one step of a process. It exists only in the doing. Where attention points right now.

Most "AI workflows" are one phase: type a prompt, hope. Mine has four. The build doesn't start until phase four. By then the AI is barely making decisions. It's executing a contract. Phase one: Brainstorm Open conversation. No structure, no acceptance criteria yet, no scope. I yap. Claude compresses what I yap into a `.md` file in real time. We argue. We rule things out. We name the actual outcome I'm chasing, not the thing I thought I wanted when I started talking. The output of phase one is one sentence: **what done looks like.** CRUSH started as "I want a video plugin that feels analogue." Two hours of brainstorm later the doc said: "14 Metal fragment shaders, a 6-slot effect chain, three global controls (DECIMATE, SPAZ, CHILL), real-time on Apple Silicon, drag-and-drop in DaVinci Resolve." That's the outcome that got dispatched. Phase two: Implementation plan Now I take the outcome and ask Claude to architect it. Files, dependencies, the order things get built in, the places it's likely to fall over. This is still in the main session. Still advisor seat. Zero code written. The plan for CRUSH was a 6-stage build pipeline. Format design, build-time generator, plugin core, 2D shaders, splat engine, AE port. Fourteen Metal fragment shaders authored as `.crush` JSON files. A Python codegen that writes the entire C++ OFX boilerplate at compile time so adding a new effect later is JSON plus a shader function and nothing else. Every stage had acceptance criteria, file scope, and risks named upfront. By the time it was done, the plan was a single markdown artefact a fresh worker could execute against without ever talking to me. That's the goal. The plan is the spec. The spec is the thing. The plan also names risks before any worker meets them. It says: "Metal kernel buffer names must match this exact contract or DaVinci silently rejects the bundle." It says: "Real-time on Apple Silicon at 4K is the gate. If a shader drops frames during scrub, it doesn't ship."

Like a lot of people here, I started with Jake's paper. ICM made immediate sense to me, the filesystem as the orchestration, folders as stages, an agent that navigates instead of being fed. So I built with it. And somewhere along the way I realized my main workspace was never a pipeline like ICM describes. So I made a workspace builder skill off the paper, and started my first true pipeline workspace and the contrast became apparent. My original workspace has been running for months now, agent-maintained, prose-dense, and the thing I was tending wasn't a sequence of stages anymore. It was a body of knowledge. Decisions piling up, conventions hardening, old files going quietly stale, and the question I kept hitting wasn't "what runs next." It was "does the right knowledge still reach the right task." Then Google published OKF, and the pieces clicked. Markdown, YAML frontmatter, typed nodes, a semantic layer over what you know. My existing html frontmatter wasn’t sufficient enough. But OKF is a format, and it says so itself. Nothing in it governs what happens when the corpus grows for a year. The next realization came when I stopped thinking in layers and started thinking in nodes: a long-running development workspace isn't a stack, it's a graph, and it accretes. So I gave it a name. An Accretive Context Graph. What it is An ACG is a project workspace built as a growing knowledge graph of plain markdown files. Each file is a node holding one piece of what the project knows: a decision, a convention, a failure, a spec. Typed links join the nodes and state what governs what, what answers what, and what depends on what. An agent works inside the graph. It walks the links to gather the context each task needs, adds what each session learns, and regenerates the indexes, maps, and checks from the prose, so the structure stays accurate as it grows. A human directs from the edge, judging what the checks and the agent surface, deciding what stays, what supersedes, and what earns a closer look. And because the graph accretes rather than resets, maintenance is part of the work: staleness is tracked, contradictions get reconciled, growth is consolidated on a cadence.

Gave Fable ALL of my ideas this morning, it's been an all day operation, but we built the entire directory of workspaces, resources, and workflows from scratch, much more optimized now! Plus it's all populated with Fable crafted templates, so I have a primary project template out of it, backed that up, now the real work begins!

Here is the the github url: https://newmeharemail-ux.github.io/ecogreen/ Actually I wanted to build a solar company website to drive conversions from visitors to quotes. The site is there but it need improvements. My plan is to add pictures first and them change some colors and make the site more dynamic and full of life. The local hosted version is showing pics but the deployed site is not. Also will love any feedback from you all.