Intros for The Connection Hub - The Vault 👤 Who I am: (name + where you're based) 🛠️ What I actually do: (the specific work — not "I'm in real estate" but "I run a 3-agent team doing residential resale in Austin") 🤖 What I'm building with AI right now: (your current project, workflow, or the thing you're stuck on) 🎯 What I'm looking for connection-wise: (pick one or two) 💡 Someone who's solved [X] 🤝 A collaborator / accountability partner 👀 Just here to learn from people in my field 🧰 Trading workflows & systems 📬 Best way to reach me: (DM here / comment / link)

Last month I was speaking with a friend who works for an engineering firm in Australia about ai, and all the cool things we can do with it these days, and he mentioned that he was trying to push to get a monthly newsletter out to their team to inform them of upcoming professional development courses and workshops. Of course it takes a lot of time to manually search the relevant websites, and put together a newsletter, etc. so no one has done it. I asked a few more questions about the tools they use, and then went and built out a small, structured ICM folder system, with the exact same blueprint that we have been learning in here and using for the competition building. I then made a loom video showing how it worked, and then emailed it to him along with the fully company branded email that it output. It was near the end of financial year at the time, so they were a bit busy, and he said he'd get back to me. Today, 1 month later, he came back and accepted my quote of $600, which includes 2 rounds of revision. To get the draft up and tested, it took me probably about 4 hours, and then there will be another few hrs in finalising it (with the revisions). In reality I probably undersold myself, but this is a side project at the moment (I run a cafe, not an ai consulting business...yet!), and I was excited to have the opportunity at a real client to test against. Let me be clear, I'm not selling a fancy Ai loaded website or app or anything... It is literally 5 folders, with a top level claude.md file, instructing claude co-work (or claude ai or code - or any other Ai tool that can follow structured instructions with a renaming of the claude.md file) on exactly what to do. This is exactly what Jake has been teaching here, and it will stand the test of time. As Anthropic updates their interface, and Open Ai starts to take over claude or another better tool comes along, this ICM folder system will continue to do its thing. It may need some tweaks along the way, but it's not going to need it's whole codebase updated or anything, because it's all plain language, english instructions.

Everyone here has already leaned into context. ICM, the folder architecture, the AGENT.md (see my previous post if you're still using CLAUDE.md) scaffolding, or at least is beginning that process. I want to share the mental model of LLMs that guides my decisions and proactive thinking, because it also tells you exactly where your setup still fails: your model is a 10-year-old with super-intelligence. The super-intelligence half is why LLMs are useful at all, obviously. It out-reasons us on anything bounded and holds more in its head than we can. The 10-year-old half is the entire reason ICM exists: it has never seen your world, doesn't retain across sessions, and will confidently guess when you leave a gap. Even the most aware 10-year-old kid doesn't have nuance or critical thinking to understand your implicit judgment, how to move past errors, or what to do when lost. Your inherent file structure + good routing will do wonders to mitigate this, but errors will still arise, and the key here is to know how to be proactive, rather than reactive, to these errors. You don't want to clean up the mess a 10-year-old made; you want to predict and prevent that mess to begin with. Unfortunately, this also means you have to own the tasks you want your LLM to do. If you have no idea what a class or function is, you have no way to 1. integrate your own methodology for troubleshooting and 2. actually pass judgment on the work your AI has done. You wouldn't let a 10-year-old run amok within your business, no matter how capable they are. If you want to build anything semi-complex with AI, you need to take the time to build a foundational understanding of code. Although it seems tedious and less rewarding, the ROI from doing the due diligence here is more than worth it. Happy to share some of the practices I've integrated to help me accomplish this!

First off, hopefully this doesn't break any rules... I am a technically oriented person who wants to learn more about the business side of AI. I'm at a rough spot where I know I have developed a valuable understanding and skill set with AI, but I don't know where to go from here. I've seen a variety of experience and enterprise levels within this community, and I'd love to connect & be mentored directly by anyone who has actually applied my proficiency in AI to build any kind of business service or directly implement systems in businesses. If possible, I would love the opportunity to contribute or work on anything as a learning experience at the intersection of AI and business, but I'm honestly happy to just connect and chat. I'd also love to swap experiences and information with people who are more on the business side, who are maybe not as technical! That's also not to say I'm pushing away anyone who doesn't have either; I would love to chat and help anywhere possible! P.S. my level is too low to DM, so please feel free to go ahead and shoot me one.

If your main files still sit under ~/.claude or ~/.codex, you're still not quite there yet, or more importantly, safe. Think: if the Claude app decided to nuke itself tomorrow, wiped the whole application folder and everything inside it, how cooked are you? With what Grok AI pulled off recently (downloading whole Repos of information without permission), you can never be too safe. <- PLEASE read up on this if you're not caught up. Now, however ridiculous the idea you might think, the proposition still stands. If your instructions, context routing, and memory all live inside ~/.claude (or wherever your app stores its files), you don't have a model-agnostic structure. You have an app-dependent one. If Claude suddenly decides to stop supporting certain file customizability and directly, it'll be an immense and frustrating headache to fix. While it likely won't happen soon, or at all tbh, the simple fix is decoupling. My whole global system, I personally named it "BABEL," lives in its own folder directly, version-controlled, completely separate from any app folder. What sits inside the Claude and Codex apps is just a thin layer of symlinks and shims pointing back to my global ICM structure. If my Claude wiped its own folder right now: - My instructions, memory, registries, skills, docs are completely fine. - Restoring is one simple prompt for me. Re-point the symlinks, and I'm good. - Want to move to a different client entirely? Same source files, new shim layer. The brain doesn't move at all, and even a fresh, completely new LLM harness is good enough to wire itself in with symlinks. Was inspired to post this after the recent Grok incident; happy to break down how the symlink layer works if anyone wants it.