I kept watching Jake's videos, reading the ICM paper, Karpathy threads… and forgetting most of it a week later. Learning the wrong layer, but with my own knowledge.
So I built the thing the content kept pointing at. Not a notes app. An ICM workspace for my own learning.
The rules (sound familiar?):
- raw/ is immutable. Transcripts, PDFs, papers. The LLM reads, never edits.
- wiki/ is the LLM's workspace: entities, concepts, sources, analysis, overview.
- Claude Code writes. Obsidian is the front-end. I read; it writes.
- Every claim links to a source. No orphan facts.
One ingest: I drop a transcript in raw/ and say "ingest it." A single 22-min Van Clief video cascaded into ~10 linked pages in one pass (a summary, 2 new entities, 5 updated pages, index + log), cross-linked, with contradictions flagged rather than silently resolved.
After ~3 months: ~35 sources, 84 interlinked pages, every claim cited. No vectors, no RAG. The folder path is in the memory, and I can read every byte.
I'm using the method to learn the method. Folders over agents, pointed at my own head. (I'm starting an AI-implementation practice in Brazil built on ICM, so this doubles as the knowledge base behind my client work.)