I used the production line by @Ry Mac to make my second YouTube video, and I want to share how it went. I started the gameplan Saturday morning. By the end of the night the video was on YouTube, the blog post was live on my site, and the lesson was in my Skool classroom. That included the recording and the edit. The line has 9 stages, and it will not let you skip one. Gameplan, script, spec, reader, storyboard, a 90 second test render, the full render, the package, and the blog. I wanted to skip the spec at one point. It stopped me, and it was right, because the spec is where the problems showed up before I recorded anything. A few things that stood out for me: The reader is a slide page I record my voice from. One line at a time, with a hold marker when I need to pause. I recorded the whole script in one take and only had to fix one line. Everything is timed to my real voice. It listened to the recording and lined every slide up to the words I actually said. When I said a line a little differently than the script, it changed the caption to match me. It checks its own work. Before it showed me the final video, it went through every cut and found 3 captions that came up a beat late, and a banner in one of my screen recordings that should not have been public. It fixed them before I saw them. The renders run in the cloud. My laptop stayed free, and all of the rendering for the day cost less than a dollar. It is built as a folder system, the same ICM idea we talk about here. Every stage is a file I can open, so I always knew where it was at. Thank you @Ry Mac . The production-line is amazing!!!

Something I read in The Age of AI made me rethink how I use ICM. My natural tendency is to approach ICM through business process orchestration. I define the stages, describe the steps, and try to make the whole workflow explicit. But sometimes I take this too far and turn the stages into strict rules. The result becomes over-engineered, uses more tokens, and often works less naturally with AI. I recently had the opposite experience. We replaced a detailed process with a simple skill that described the essential pattern, and the results were much better. That made something click for me. Maybe stages should act as an interpretable scaffold, rather than a fixed algorithm. They can clarify the purpose, context, constraints, handoffs, and expected outcome, while still allowing the AI to work out the best path. AI may free us from having to define an entire process in advance. But if we specify less, evaluating the outcome becomes even more important. We need to check the quality of the result, capture what we learn, and use that learning to improve the scaffold over time. Does anyone else start with ICM and then gradually slip back into rigid, rule-based process design? How do you decide what needs to be specified and what should be left for the AI to infer?

I'm building my first ICM structure, and I'm not sure which folder to create. Here's the context to see if I am asking the right questions or if I am not seeing the problem correctly: I'm a video editor. I have two agencies as clients, and I want to generate more demand for my services because I still have the bandwidth and my income is barely above my expenses, so I don't feel financially secure. So I don't necessarily have a very specific project to work on right now because basically I don't know where to begin (hence why I don't know what folder to create). And I was thinking of creating an ICM structure to help me organize my freelancing career. But here's the question. Should I create a general ICM folder where it's like "Sebastian's life"? And inside, I give my life's context, where a folder inside that will have my freelance career context? Or should I first start creating "from the end" towards "the beginning", meaning that I create text files based on, for example, my offer. So once my offer is done it will be a folder with all that information. So with time, I will create multiple folders that will live inside a "Freelance career" folder where, any time I ask claude to help me with a task regarding my freelance career, it will have all the necessary information. Hopefully that made sense. To try to tie it all together and hopefully make sense to anyone reading, what I'll try to do next is put this exact text to Claude with Jake's ICM skill and let Claude ask me questions and go from there. (First time asking a question; sorry if it was vague and not very specific/productive 😅)

learning this icm framework was easy and im creating worflows and semi automations now very easily (done some personal and one for my brother), so creating part is where im good due to my experience in product management (non tech guy) but the other part is selling and giving service of creating workflows to real businesses is where im strugling. Im not sure how to find clients so may be someone here can give me a direction. One of my developer friend told me no one will buy folders. they will buy an actuall software. i showed him what i built, he was impresed but still not convinced that real businesses will use this. Learning and creating is easy now but selling is still difficult.

Finally giving my view on JEV in my classic history and fundamentals fashion but... This one is a little different. It's my first time making a fully animated, pixel art video, and I'd honestly love to know what you think of the style. Should I make more like this? I made an ICM that fully automates most of the process i was able to get this video built in about three or four hours. Talk about a fun animation style right? Might redo a bunch of the videos in the classroom with this.