I've got a technical issue that needs some outside help. My background is not tech so it's not something I'm confident giving Claude an answer to so I got it to ask the question and said I'd give it any responses I got. Here's what it asked... I help run a small street food business, and we've built our internal tools as an ICM workspace. It's been working well. I've hit a structural question I'd like your view on before we change anything. The setup One folder holds four tools side by side, each a full pipeline with its own CLAUDE.md: - PRODUCTION-RUN: weekly orders in; production sheet and courier/invoice files out - SALES-HISTORY: who's buying more or less, week to week - COST-CALCULATOR: labour and ingredient cost per product - STAFF-HOURS: hours, holiday, and the monthly payroll file to the accountant The top-level CLAUDE.md only routes to the right tool. There's no shared reference folder at the top level. Our rule versus the skill Our top-level CLAUDE.md says each tool "holds its own data, and points at nothing outside itself", and that "a pointer across folders is how a suite turns into a tangle." The icm-architect skill's Umbrella form is looser. Sub-pipelines "don't share state" except through the root reference layers, and shared reference material should be linked up rather than duplicated. What actually happens Two of our tools break our own rule on purpose: - SALES-HISTORY reads PRODUCTION-RUN's weekly production sheets and its customer list. It also keeps its own snapshot of customer prices, and its own copies of older hand-kept sheets. - COST-CALCULATOR reads the same weekly production sheets. In both, only the first stage reaches across, and only once. Every later stage is told not to load anything from PRODUCTION-RUN. STAFF-HOURS reads nothing outside itself. It only mentions PRODUCTION-RUN in its notes, as a comparison. Each tool runs a check at the start of every session that reports any file path it can't find inside its own folder. So every reference to another tool gets reported as broken, every session.

Before watching the video, I gave AI full control and autonomy to just ask and wait for the answer without specific structure. Now I am taking control. I am organizing the folders like departments and specific deliverables at our company. I'm thinking of any AI just like a new hire and what they would need and where they would go to find the resources. Right now I'm still stuck on how to get the AI to audit the markdown files and update them automatically based on changes, but I'm hoping this will be addressed in the upcoming video. The biggest advantage to this is that now we will have full control instead of random answers from AI web sources that might not be relevant to the way we do things.

Hey Clief Notes fam! 👋 I'm Ray and I'm stoked to be here. That last sentence is 100% true but I’m 63 years old so don’t use the word stoked, but it was in the template so I’m gonna leave it in 😁 🙋 A little about me: I look after the finances for 2 small companies. One, a street food company, loves ICM even though they have no clue what it is. I get to play with all their data to see what we can create with it. I joined Clief Notes back in April. I watched a lot of the lessons and went away to play around with folders. I keep coming back when I get stuck but probably should spend more time in here. 🎯 My current goal: I’m probably like a lot of people in here, I can see the potential that ICM offers but haven’t figured out how to make a business out of it yet. That’s what I’m aiming for… 💪 What I'm currently building/working on: The first process I automated was a production sheet for the kitchen. The old way… Email orders arrived and the products, production dates, and purchase order numbers were manually entered into the sheet. This sheet became the source of truth that the Invoices and shipping labels were created from. About 50 customers, ~100 orders per week, and 1000’s of data points all being manually entered into an Excel sheet. Invoices were created manually, as were the shipping labels. This was not just time-consuming, it also resulted in a ton of mistakes being made every week. The new way… Email orders arrive, and go into their weekly folder. Claude reads them and creates the production sheet. When needed, it spits out CSVs that get uploaded to our CRM to create the invoices and labels. The old way took 2 full days for someone to complete, a lot of that time was unpicking the mistakes that got spotted then editing invoices, labels etc. but mistakes still got through. The new way takes less than 1 hour per week and we’ve only had 1 mistake in the last 4 months. That was down to a human (me) losing an email. We’re introducing other tools as well, a time/vacation tool that keeps track of everything for our payroll. An ingredients/recipe tool that tells the kitchen what it needs to buy to fulfil orders and how much it can spend. And others…

📣 Update (9/20/26): Comp 13 Rules Added Current Challenge: Competition 13 The Challenge 💪 - Build a folder-based AI translator that takes one kind of work and turns it into another kind of work. Same shape in, same shape out, every time. Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-13-the-translator Good luck everyone! --- What this thread is: I’ve seen a number of people either not know competitions are going on or know how to find them so here is a quick single source thread where you can get to them all. I’ll keep this updated as new challenges are released. See the current challenge as well as all past challenges below! Format for community challenges: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/how-competitions-work-from-now-on?p=84912d60 Weekly leaderboard competition: Alongside the biweekly challenges, there is a weekly leaderboard challenge where the member at the top of the 7 day rolling leaderboard wins a free upgrade to their membership. This winner is announced on Mondays typically. @Joshua Hubbard has gone another step further and created a thread linking to all competition entries. Link here: https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/the-competition-archive-every-entry-every-week-every-link?p=bd752987 --- Past Challenges Competition 1 The Challenge 💪 - Build a brand voice document for a pet grooming business Rules & submissions 🗒️ - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/first-ever-weekly-competition-is-live?p=90f50bf9 Results🏆 - https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/weekly-comp-1-winner-ian-barriopedro?p=0501b57e

This community is large and it moves fast. That's the good part and it's also the problem: valuable posts get buried, the same questions get re-asked instead of found, and spammers show up wherever there's an audience. These guidelines are what keeps the room worth showing up to. Read them once. You won't need them again, because most of this is what you'd do anyway. New here? Start with Jake's welcome post and the Foundation course. This post is about how we behave, not where to begin. 1. Build in public. Post the thing while it's half working. A half-finished build is more useful to everyone else than the polished writeup you'll never get around to, and you'll get corrected before you've spent a week going the wrong way. 2. Teach what you learn. The day you figure something out is the day you're best at explaining it, because you still remember exactly what confused you. A month later you've forgotten the hard part and your explanation gets worse. If you cracked something this week, that's a post. Nobody has to earn the right to ask a question here, but this place only works because people come back and answer them once they can. 3. Ask good questions. Specific beats polite. "How should I structure this?" gets three vague answers. "I have a 40 file client folder, the model keeps loading the wrong context file, here's my CLAUDE.md" gets a real one. Say what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead. A more in depth guide: https://dontasktoask.com The flip side of this: "Anyone here?", "Help please", and one line questions with no context may get removed. Not to be harsh, but because nobody can answer them. 4. Give credit. If you built on someone's skill, template, folder structure or comment, tag them. It costs you nothing and it's the reason people keep publishing their work here instead of keeping it. A lot of the best material in this community started as somebody's reply on somebody else's post.