Closed my first real retainer last month and I start in three weeks!! Putting the whole plan here because I'd rather find out now what I got wrong than in month three The situation. Family holding in LatAm, retail plus financial services, several companies under it. Monthly retainer, four hours a day on site, three months to start. What they want is the stuff that lives in three or four people's heads: why decisions get made the way they do, what got tried before, what broke. Written down, and answerable in plain language. The long game is a private system per founding partner, for succession. I'm one guy. Nothing signed yet... The plan for the first 3 months: Month 1 is entirely non-technical. Map where the knowledge actually lives, which folders, which spreadsheets, whose head. Then measure a baseline before touching anything: how long it takes someone to find an answer today, how often the person who knows gets interrupted. Without that number, nothing I build later can be compared to anything Month 2, a small non-sensitive corpus goes in and a second real user starts using it. Then a hand-written eval set built with their own person. Twenty to thirty questions, expected answer, expected source document, plus negative controls where the right answer is "no record of that" Month 3 is the part I care about. Week 11 I don't open the system at all, and we count how many queries happened without me. That's the acceptance criterion, written into the contract: the designated users operate it without the consultant present. Hard to fake on purpose Three calls I made that I'm not certain about: Cloud with a zero-retention agreement instead of on-prem, even though they asked for maximum privacy. My reasoning: on-prem means weeks of importing hardware before anything exists, the models that fit in an office server are worse, and buying only makes sense once you've measured real usage. So the architecture keeps the corpus and the index on their side and treats the model as a swappable endpoint. Reversible in that direction, not the other one

It’s live. Starting today, everyone in Clief Notes has access to the new Clief Notes AI. The easiest way to use it? Don’t overthink it. Ask it the question you would normally ask me. “Where should I start?” “What should I focus on next?” “Where did you talk about [topic]?” It’ll use what’s already inside Clief Notes to help answer you and point you toward the right lesson or resource when there’s something worth going deeper on. The goal isn’t to give you another AI tool to play with. It’s to make everything already inside this community easier to actually use. If you want Access to it Comment "READY" and we'll send you access to it!

I spent this week hardening my workspace setup and fell down the backup rabbit hole. Sharing the thought process because I want to know what everyone else is doing. My whole workspace lives under local git. I don't keep it there for code reasons. The win is auditing: every change is signed, human or agent, and I can see exactly what the AI did each session and roll any of it back. Once you let agents write into your folders, that flight recorder stops feeling optional. But git pulls a thread. A live repo can't sit inside OneDrive or iCloud. Sync engines fight the history layer: conflicted copies, placeholder files the agent can't actually read, endless re-upload of thousands of tiny .git objects. So the workspace has to move OUTSIDE the one backup most people already have. Which means backup now needs its own answer. The thing that clicked for me: a backup has to answer two different questions. "Give me my files back" and "give me my history back." Most setups only answer the first. OneDrive only answers the first. My own answer is three layers (external drive snapshot, remotes for the code, encrypted offsite for history) but I'm the nerd who enjoys that. The version I keep kicking around for everyone else: the agent zips the whole workspace, history included, and drops a dated zip into the OneDrive folder you already pay for. Keep the newest two, delete older. Sync can't host a live repo, but it carries a dead zip just fine. So what are you actually doing? Do you run git over a non-code workspace, and was the auditing worth the extra layers? What is your backup story for the folders your agents work in? Has OneDrive or iCloud alone ever actually saved you, or does it just feel safe?

If my folders are Design, Build, Review and Test, what are some ways I could keep track of which stages have been run and their results?

Most ICM folders that feel cramped after a month have the same problem. Everything in them is a process, because a process is the only shape the tree knows how to hold. Then you build something that more than one process uses. A video renderer, a formatter, a checker that validates output before it moves on. It has no home, so it goes inside whichever process needed it first, and now the second process reaches sideways into the first one's folder to get at it. Do that three times and the tree stops being a map. The split that fixes it is processes and capabilities, side by side at the top. A process is a job with an owner and an end. A capability is something processes call. The test is one line: if two processes need it, it does not go inside either one. The part that does the work is what each capability publishes. Not its implementation, just a short contract: what it takes in, what it hands back, what it does when the input is wrong. Three lines is usually enough. Processes reference the contract and nothing else. Two things fall out of that for free. You can replace the tool behind a capability without opening a single process file. The renderer becomes something else next year and the contract does not move. And when something breaks you know whose fault it is before you open anything. Output wrong but shaped right, the process is wrong. Output the wrong shape, the capability is wrong. That question used to cost me an afternoon. The tell that you need this: you have a folder whose name is a tool rather than a job. That is a capability wearing a process costume.