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.

So today’s addition to my Slack command centre is the beginning of my content creation process. (Thanks to @David Vogel for suggesting Buzz yesterday, sadly it doesn’t accommodate buttons yet, but I’m monitoring developments) I’m working on my Pat’s Film Club workspace, and yesterday: - Created the process to pull all the image assets of a film that I’m going to show from Movie Database, to create marketing materials. - Created the process where I could officially program the film once I’ve got a confirmation from the cinema about the booking. This then creates an event in the Community calendar, and a space for the Film in the current screenings discussion area, pre-populated with topics for the trailer, Film details and an essay on why I chose the film (which was empty). - Wired these processes to buttons in a Slack app so I could run them at will without having to remember slash commands or have a model interpret what I want. Today was about capturing my thoughts about the film to create a master resource in my own voice that could then be repurposed for all materials - website copy, posts, email sequences and social media captions. Using the steps I’d already been doing in my Second Brain system, I adapted them to run through ICM folders. I used @Jake Van Clief ’s ICM Architect skill, but was also inspired by @Ry Mac ’s 3-jobs-rule. The process: - I identify the film - I talk for as long as I want with all the details I want to say about the film, my story with it, etc - It keeps the raw version, then fact checks the details and presents me with its suggested corrections for my approval - It creates a tidied version just using my words, and presents it for my approval - It then takes the approved version and uses it to see if there are any new insights to add to my “Pat’s voice” reference file, and suggests them to me (if any) - If I approve them, it updates the voice file and then has the raw and tidied versions of my content, ready for repurposing. - Wired this process into my Slack app - where everything is done.