Ran a four-stage audit pipeline (my first real ICM build), assuming each stage got a fresh window. Nope. After the full run: 302.8k tokens — 281.3k of it transcript. Everything I engineered (CLAUDE.md, contracts, skills) was 25k. My architecture: 8% of the window. The chatter: 92%. One /clear: down to -282k. Messages: 137 tokens. It picked the run back up from the stage output folders without asking me anything, because my CLAUDE.md tells a fresh session to orient from artifacts, never from the conversation. (Protocol block in the comments if you want it.) So the files hold the state, but to run /clear, I have to do it between the stages? How are y'all automating the clear between stages? By hand at every gate? A wrapper running each stage as its own `claude -p`? Something else? Or does it not matter?

@Ry Mac did a GREAT job simplifying things down. Recommend taking a look. Has his own group too! https://skool.com/buildmarketclose/about

Well, welcome to one of my very few posts I have out here on this community. I've been working on a lot of different things over the last, I don't know, since last year when I really put the foot on the gas building out different accounting software. I got caught in the cycle of build, tear down, build, tear down, build, tear down, and never fully launching. So, here's my win for the last week: I was able to push my website into production. I do have a customer-facing website, but the big deal was that I was able to use a number of different coding tools to connect my CRM, build out a content creation workflow, build out the branding, and also harden my AI harness. Now I'm able to go out and not worry about prompting injections to hit my OS and the different things that might be out there when people are targeting AI agents that do things like my harness will do—going out, finding leads, improving lead identification, and the different signals for what the potential client and lead might want. The win was that I didn't do it at my desk; I did it from my phone while I was enjoying my life. That was the most important thing for me as an entrepreneur when I first started this side gig cycle of trial and error back in 2008, a few years before my first son was born. The hardest part was trying to get to a point where I could not feel guilty for working. Right now, I can do that. "Prompt and walk away" is not what these AI vampire bros want you to do right now, right? I think everyone is saying, "Hey, there's opportunity cost; we need to step on the gas. AI is cheap, computing is cheap, etc.But for me, freedom is everything. Now, I'm actively further than I've ever been—embarrassingly further than I've ever been—in all of my businesses. Reaching out has always been the bottleneck for me, so now I'm actively getting leads and actively reaching out. So the next time I post, I hope to post some deals that I've closed. I hope to share with you some of the contracts, redacted, just so that you can understand what deals are out there and how you guys can do the same for yourselves.

I searched through the community to see if anyone posted about the foundation layer of every business: accounting. If I missed a thread on this, please point me toward it! If it hasn't been covered yet, here is what I’m thinking. I'd love to get some ideas on how to design a basic folder setup that every member here could use to kickstart their own accounting department—essentially an ICM Accounting System. I follow a guy on TikTok who leverage trades crypto, which is an absolute accounting nightmare. A member asked him how he handles his taxes, and his answer stuck with me. He said wealthy people rely on three key professionals to minimize their tax burden and preserve long-term wealth: a bookkeeper, an accountant, and a tax attorney, in that exact order. I prompted Gemini for a structure using the ICM methodology framework and got a solid blueprint. Before I take it further: Has anyone else in the group tackled this yet? If not, do you think it would be valuable to build out a basic starter folder structure to share with the group? Just thinking out loud, so I’d really appreciate your input!

I have been running into massive issues with large project execution. I have solid PRDs, tech specs, implementation plans, etc. Everything is decomposed/sharded into atomic tickets in github...and yet the projects all go sideways and then just seem to be on constant side quests. I'm missing something obviously, people seem to be able to build full apps and yet I'm constantly finding that every ticket I work on creates two more and the project then needs to rewrite some other piece and we're going the wrong direction fast. I can have codex or claude run for hours and hours, only to find they haven't made headway closing a single ticket due to this issue. I must be failing at something basic. Unless I use the terminal and prompt one small idea at a time, things seem to fall apart and I constantly need to have the coding agent 'regroup' and revise the plan. That's when it's clear things went way off the rails and what it said it was doing and what the tickets directed it to do versus what it actually did were night and day. So i would have to unravel bunch of commits, etc. It's a mess. Anyone have a direction they can point me for controlling these kinds of full projects? I've got my orchestration working (mostly) accurately to handle a ticket or two for bugfixes and feature adds on existing solutions, but greenfield stuff is painfully failing.