Today was a massive win. I had my meeting with the Head of AI for our global group, and it went beyond anything I had imagined. The Pitch: 132 Orders and a "Broken" System I had the chance to present a real-world challenge: Manually processing 132 sales orders in April. The workflow is a nightmare: Open each order, find the amount, cross-check it with an Excel sheet, invoice it, and repeat. To make it worse, there is a known bug in our D365 environment where the amount column simply shows "0" in the grid, meaning I can’t just export a list. It requires manual clicks. In a busy finance department, this takes days because of constant interruptions. I presented my workflow and explained how this concept isn't just for one task—it’s a framework for almost every repetitive monthly task we have. I knew from my previous Rebill Project that if I can automate the "friction," I can win back my time. The Result: Skipping the Queue When I told the Head of AI that this could turn a 3-4 day job into about 1 hour, his eyes lit up. Even though Claude Code is still stuck in corporate governance (it's currently with our CEO to decide on a global rollout), he didn't want me to wait. He immediately assigned me a Microsoft Copilot Studio license. These are highly restricted—usually, there’s a long waiting list, and if you don't use it for 30 days, you lose it. He bypassed the entire queue to get me started right away. Moving the Needle with IT To get "Copilot Cowork" talking to D365, I had to submit a technical IT ticket to enable the Model Context Protocol (MCP). I made sure to CC both the Head of AI and my own manager. The Head of AI jumped straight into the ticket with this comment: "I talked to Allan today. He has an idea to speed up a process in finance and save days of work... The use of the MCP server for this would help him very much. Open for a call if needed or any other help for the team."

This took a few weeks. Not building. Training. Tweaking. Breaking. Locking. Running the same flows over and over until the architecture stopped bending. Everyone here knows ICM. What this is… is what happens when you actually live inside it long enough. Not theory. Not clean diagrams. Real load. A few things only showed up under pressure: - The moment where orchestrator wants to execute… and you don’t let it - The cost of letting workers “figure things out” vs forcing briefs to be exact - How fast token bloat creeps in when you don’t treat load surface as a constraint - The difference between a rule you wrote… and a rule you had to write three times At some point, things flipped. The system stopped feeling like something I was managing… and started feeling like something that was holding shape on its own. That’s when the real work began. What’s in here is not “a good setup”. It’s what survived: - multiple passes of weekly audits - repeated cold starts - real production friction - and a lot of “this felt right but didn’t hold” A few things I’d pay attention to if you explore it: - Where boundaries are enforced (not suggested) - What got locked into rules vs left flexible - How briefs are treated as contracts, not prompts - How little the orchestrator actually does Also interesting: The extraction itself. That process alone shows you what was structural… and what was just personal preference. → https://github.com/NFTYoginis/creator-orchestrator-template If you’re deep into ICM already, you’ll see where this goes. Curious what breaks for you — or what holds better than expected.

We've been hoarding links like digital pack rats -- and it's time to crack the vault open. Jake and I put together a running list of the tools, resources, and random goldmines we keep coming back to. The stuff that actually stuck after the hype wore off. If it survived our workflows, it earned a spot here. https://www.skool.com/quantum-quill-lyceum-1116/classroom/c7f102c7?md=59285d6b92ed425cae7f439761e26acf ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THIS IS Think of it as a curated toolbox -- not a "Top 100 AI Tools" listicle from some SEO farm. These are things we've actually used, broken, duct-taped back together, and kept reaching for. Some are well-known, some are buried gems we stumbled on at 2am while chasing a rabbit hole. WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU This page is alive. It's not a monument -- it's a workbench. - Drop a comment if something on here saved you hours (or cost you hours -- we want to know that too) - Suggest additions -- what's in YOUR toolchest that we're sleeping on? - Call us out -- if something's outdated, broken, or just not as good as the alternative you found, tell us - Share your use case -- same tool hits different in different hands. How are you actually using these? We'll keep updating this as the collective stack evolves. Your feedback shapes what stays, what goes, and what gets added next. ------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer: You know the drill -- this is garage tinkering, not production gospel. Your mileage may vary. Duct-tape what works and break what doesn't. Let's keep building brains that can't be taken away from us.

This is my first major win applying what @Jake Van Clief ef teaches. Since subscribing to Claude Code on March 19th, I’ve been able to show so much progress that my company has now upgraded me to the Max 5x subscription. Looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and continuing to improve our processes! As a Finance Manager responsible for month-end closing, I wanted to see what Claude Code could actually achieve—and it delivered! Even without Azure or backend access to our ERP system (D365 F&O), I didn't let that stop me from being "efficiently lazy." Claude Code showed me how to use the Playwright MCP to control Chrome and handle the heavy lifting for me. The script now automatically downloads the monthly trial balance, populates an Excel template, identifies discrepancies via color-coding, and even takes screenshots to document numbers from various reports. I’m already tackling my next big automation project—a task that is notoriously tedious when done manually. Stay tuned for that post, as well as more month-end automation updates in the near future! I had Claude code describe the workflow: Common Reconciliation — Monthly Close Automation with Claude Code + Playwright MCP Every month-end I run a single slash command (/mec-common) and pass it a month number. Claude then drives the entire reconciliation process end-to-end, touching both a live D365 ERP system and a multi-sheet Excel workbook — no manual steps. The workflow in three phases: Phase 1 — Trial Balance Claude navigates to the D365 Trial Balance page, clears any stale filters, sets the correct date range, triggers a recalculation, and downloads the export. The Excel file is placed in the right folder, and the data is pasted (values only) into the reconciliation workbook's Trial bal D365 sheet. A full workbook recalculation is then forced before anything is read. Phase 2 — Revaluation Check Claude loops through ~50 reconciliation sheets. On each sheet it finds the last row where column C says "Revaluation" (there are two — the second one holds the actual diff) and reads the value in column G. If the diff is outside ±1, the sheet tab is colored red. One sheet (150070) is always flagged red and requires manual review regardless.

I want to render cool visualizations of building and office floorplans...any idea what a good workflow or resource would be?