Hi all 👋 This is my first post and video. I have been a VIP member since March. I continue to learn and get value from all aspects of this community on a regular basis. I also joined the Lyceum recently to better understand how to translate everything that I have been learning and processing for the last ~6 months into a tangible skill, product, business and more. The progress that I have made so far has been well worth it. Given that its structured like a class, there are assignments, deadlines, group work, etc. That means more opportunity to procrastinate! In my most recent bender of procrastinating, I decided to be productive and try new things. I made a video in attempt to summarize many recent updates to how I work with Claude on a day to day basis. So here's my version... and it was supposed to be 30 seconds. It's version five and a bit over five minutes. I got way off track, lost the plot and burned way too many tokens - but I learned a lot and fun along the way! Hope there is something in there for at least 1 person 🙌 My Human Harness - First video I've ever made - Posting my imperfections

Hi all! Video two is done. The first one was the human side of how I work. This one is the Claude side: how I run it so the right model does the right job, without me having to tell it. It's 3 minutes 45 seconds, and I explain it as a mechanic's shop: - Haiku is the parts runner - Sonnet is the mechanic - Opus is the foreman - The Fable models are the specialist I call in on purpose You don't pay the foreman to fetch a filter, and you don't ask the runner to decide if the engine is worth saving. Then it covers how my rules sit in layers (one for everywhere, one for each project), why that keeps the cost of a request down (the cache), how helpers and workflows use it, and my own numbers from the last month. About 96% of my input tokens were cache reads, which at public list prices works out to roughly 90% cheaper than paying full price for every token. That's list-price math, not my bill, and the video says so. I'm not saying it's perfect or right. It's just what we built. I'm still learning and I still get things wrong, so if you spot something I got wrong, please tell me. Video: https://youtu.be/6RonYbHcbbw First video, if you missed it: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/the-most-productive-procrastination-period-ive-ever-had Heads up: the narration is an AI clone of my own voice (ElevenLabs), every drawing is an illustration, and I wrote the words and directed Claude to build it. Which model do you reach for first, and what makes you switch up or down?

@Aaron Parker asked how my animations come out the way they do. I said I brain dumped and went YOLO. That was half true, so here's the proper answer. First, Jake's kit. I run it as it came and haven't touched the engine. The thing it does that matters most is timing: it turns the voice into word timestamps, so animations land on the exact word being said. That's why it feels designed and not just pasted on. Otherwise, I just started a session in my project folder that contained it and told it to use that workflow. I did not start a session at the proper folder ICM level. Second, the drawings aren't the kit's stock characters. Claude wrote custom drawing code on top of it. My character, a race car driver mechanic type, is drawn once in a shared file and reused in every scene, so he never drifts. He came from me rejecting two attempts and saying what I wanted. Though it felt very brief and quick based on some general desires. Third, and I think this is the real answer, the way it got built. Every video is split into short scenes. One AI builds a scene, a different AI looks at still frames of it and sends it back. Most first builds got sent back. In one pass, all eight scenes did. When a reviewer noticed the crew drawn three different ways, we locked the drawings into one library and every scene had to use it. I also wrote the look down first: my colors, one highlight at a time, big text, calm motion. This was the automated part of my mess. My part was almost all "what", not "how" and honing it in. Stuff like "the hand looks off around 1:55", "too much green", "the ending's abrupt", "wrong theme, give me options". About 16 rounds of that across five videos. That's the YOLO part I undersold: I didn't write any technique, but I did a lot of looking and saying no. This is also the part that I will be able to create my own process from, and it only took a couple tries. The ROI on YOLO mode is well worth it. Two things that saved me the most time. Picking from options instead of describing a look (four themes, a few character styles), and getting the idea out of my head first. My first versions were wrong because Claude guessed what I meant - here is where I learned just from one video how to better review a transcript before we generate the audio, and to generate the audio before we generate the preview slide deck of the animations, and then tie it all together, and then preview the whole thing. And that led to less steps because I noticed getting to the end result and modifying different elements of it was. More tedious and time-consuming and less productive.

If you've been following along, I swear I am not getting shiny object syndrome. I'm not going to start building robots tomorrow. But it's on the docket. Here's why... People are trying to build humanoid cleaning robots, but that's not the right move. The ICM method demonstrates, by the nature of it, a future where robots have specialty jobs, rather than an all-in-one perfectly dexterous machine. And maybe we do get there eventually, but I'm watching what these companies are trying to do with the cleaning robots and I think they're doing it all wrong. The future is not the terminator-maid. Women buy house cleaning, for the most part. They don't want a big heavy ass machine toppling on their kids or pets. They don't want a human inside the robot, which, by the way is how the company in SF is managing to do this. It's creepy and weird, and we're a long way from a robot being able to hand wash the dishes. No. The future for house cleaning is homes that are self cleaning, and/or wally---not the terminator--but a team of wally's that assist. Even in house cleaning, I'm betting that a human stays in the loop. Somebody has to service the robots, at the very least. As soon as I can afford it, and once we're cruising with our ICM system installed, I'm going to start developing robots. At least, I will hire someone that works towards this. If I can make a fleet of cleaning robots, we're gonna be the coolest cleaning company that has ever existed. And just maybe we can change the world, too.

Hi Everyone! I am sure this is a fraction of the capability some of you are all delivering, but wanted to share a win of mine, being a newbie and not fully advanced in the world of ICM. First Project of mine is - A Bookkeeping agent that collects Bank Statement CSVs via its Intray, reviews and processes these transactions with guidance and mapping, and delivering a CSV output to enter into my accounting software. This is for clients who don't use accounting systems such as Xero and Quickbooks for monetary reasons, or smaller businesses who want to save on their costs. I produced this project in around an hour and am so chuffed with results, it will save me hours when it comes to smaller bookkeeping and accounts preparation work. @Jake Van Clief thank you for introducing me to the world of ICM, I can't wait to see where this knowledge takes me, and I hope in the future I can build solutions for other businesses and perhaps profit from some!