I just realized something today, Jake's first classroom lesson isn't about Claude Code. It's a history lesson. Titled "A 2,000-Year Overnight Success." The argument: AI is not 70 years old. https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/classroom/d7ae60cf?md=147b0e486c964ba78a70cdc1d2d40c5d I don't need to rehash it here; if you skipped it, go back to read it. It was the first weekend of April, I had found Jake's videos the week before, then discovered Skool and dove into the classroom. I made a commitment to myself to read each page, not throw them into NotebookLM for the summary. To my disappointment, I see a super long history lesson. I sink into my chair. Eventually, I get to the end. AlphaGo. I had never heard of AlphaGo before; somehow, that story had slipped past me. I queued up YouTube on my TV and sat down for a Saturday evening documentary. Fascinating! AlphaZero started tabula rasa. Blank slate, no domain-specific human knowledge. Just the rules and play against yourself. In four hours, it rediscovered centuries of chess openings, endgames, and positional theory - then kept going past what humans ever found. Kasparov called it "like discovering the secret notebooks of some great player from the past." Those moves weren't invented. They were already in the game. The truth was latent in the mathematical structure of chess. AlphaZero excavated it. That's the archaeologist move - applied to a machine. It didn't study the tradition. It played to the pattern. Jake's throughline: "The mistake is thinking these layers replace each other. They don't. They stack." In the classroom, he could have started with how to prompt or an explanation of what a harness is. Instead, he started with the source of the whole thing. Because you can't build conviction on a trend. A pattern that's held for two thousand years isn't a trend. That's proof. I've worked with a family lumber business. 125 years old. Founded 1900, delivering coal by horse and buggy. Today, it's digital marketing, performance ads, algorithms, and closed-loop lead tracking. Every generation rebuilt what the company looked like. But the fourth-generation president still says what his father said: "Young man, we're not in the lumber business. We're in the shelter business." The tools stacked. The belief didn't.

Built another thing. Simple dashboard that collects all my tasks from different platforms into one place. It's an html file that lives on my computer. It only uses up 35MB of computer memory vs keeping asana open which uses up 25x as much (don't check my math). I can run Claude harder now. Also, pay no attention to all the overdue tasks, it's embarrassing and worse than my mathing. Stop gap while a better solution shows up.

A handful of folks from here have started connecting and sharing each other’s content on LinkedIn. Thought it would be nice to have a group over there where we can all contribute to and share our content to a wider audience through our connections. Hopefully continue to drive more folks to the conversations here as well. Please join if you’d like to connect! There’s already 20 of us in there after one day! Go boost your network. https://www.linkedin.com/groups/31160010

You guys keep liking and commenting on my confession posts, so here's another one. I wish at least one of these confessions wasn't real. They're all real (sad face). For the AI nerds in here (so, all of us): I think I'm addicted. It's worse than being hooked on a video game. A game at least has the decency to feel like a waste of time. This feels productive. Sometimes it actually is. At 1am, running six seven sessions at once? Not so much. ------------------------------------ What my nights have turned into ------------------------------------ Multiple Claude sessions going at once. When it got late and I knew I should be in bed, I'd flip every one of them with the /remote-control command so I could keep feeding the machine from my phone. Lying there in the dark. Waiting for the little dot to show up that means it's done thinking. Fire off the next instruction. Wait for the dot again. It's a slot machine. Drop the coins, pull the lever, watch for the dot. Like a freaking addict. One evening this week (I think it was Tuesday) I had three sessions all editing the same end-of-day file, and they kept overwriting each other's work. I'm sitting there getting genuinely angry. Then I caught myself cursing out a piece of software. Out loud. "You BLEEP, you broke it again." And I stopped. It's a machine, Ruben. Why are you getting triggered by a machine? And who's really doing the breaking? ------------------------------------ So I asked the machine why I can't quit the machine ------------------------------------ I did what any self-respecting addict does. I used the thing I'm addicted to, to figure out why I'm addicted to it. I'd read The Goal a while back (the Theory of Constraints novel everybody in operations swears by). I reopened it, had Claude walk me through the main concepts and tie them back to my business. And it clicked: I'm the bottleneck. My time, my attention. Not my team. Not my tools. Me. Then came the part that actually stung. The optimizing itself was the bottleneck. I'd been spending multiple two-hour sessions buffing an end-of-day routine whose entire job is to take fifteen minutes. The thing I kept "improving" stopped being my constraint years ago. I just couldn't put it down.

Quick note for those of you in here just starting out and chasing your first clients: it ain't all roses and rainbows on the other side. Most of what gets posted in this community are the wins. Tonight you get one of the harder nights. Take it however you take it. Last night a client sent me a "you didn't deliver" email at 11pm. Hard read. The kind where your stomach drops and you start rereading every contract clause you signed three months ago. Spent the next 9 hours running an audit of every deliverable across two Fractional CMO contracts and a brand + website project. By 2am I had numbers on it. They paid us a bit under $20K combined. The audit showed I'd scoped out closer to $60K of work for that price. That number is the painful one. Four mistakes got me here. Maybe one of them is sitting in your shop too. ------------------------------------ 1. I ignored the human flags. ------------------------------------ (EDIT: My team encouraged me to remove details from this first point out of an extreme abundance of caution. I don't think I'm whitewashing this point, but if you disagree, letm know in the comments. PS. Update incoming.) Early on I saw how this person treated people who weren't in the room. How they talked about the people closest to them. How they described their own team when those folks couldn't hear it. That's a personality profile in a handful of data points. I noted it. Then I told myself "everyone has their style" and kept building. And I still think there are real human reasons they operate this way. Doesn't make it right. Just explains it, instead of a throwaway "they're a narcissist." I've dealt with actual narcissists. This person doesn't fit the box. Regardless, bad call. The way someone treats the people closest to them is the way they'll eventually treat you. The clock just hadn't started. ------------------------------------ 2. I handed my thinking to AI. ------------------------------------ I let AI draft proposals without putting the same eyes on them I would've put on a 2019 proposal. Three different proposals from the same business in the same month, with three different ways of describing the same deliverable. Vague names. Duplicate items. One column literally called "SEO Content Alignment" that nobody on my team could actually explain to a client.