ICM 60/30/10 Rule · Clief Notes

ICM 60/30/10 Rule

The 60/30/10 rule, and why the 10 is the part that matters least in the mix!

When I first learned how to actually think about an AI build I was not thinking ratios, ICM change that.

Sixty percent infrastructure. Thirty percent orchestration. Ten percent AI. And I’ll be honest, when I first heard it, I assumed the AI would be the big number. That’s the part everybody’s chasing, right? It’s the smallest one on the list. Once that clicked for me, it changed how I look at everything I build.

Here’s how I understand each piece.

The 60% is infrastructure:

This is the foundation. Your folder structure, where your information lives, how it moves, the plain deterministic scaffolding that holds the whole thing up. None of it is glamorous. It’s the part people want to rush past because it feels like setup instead of real building. But this is the building. Get this part wrong and nothing you stack on top of it stays standing. Almost every time something I’ve built keeps falling over, I trace it back here.

The 30% is orchestration:

This is how it all moves. The workflow logic, the order of the steps, where the gates are, where your quality checks happen, how one step hands off to the next. The if this then that. This is where your actual thinking lives. The infrastructure gives you the shape. The orchestration is what makes the shape do something.

The 10% is AI:

This is the piece everybody obsesses over, and it’s the smallest slice of the whole thing. It’s the generation, the analysis, the part that runs at the very end once everything underneath it is already solid. When the ninety percent below it is sound, the AI looks brilliant. When it isn’t, there is no prompt on earth that saves you.

So which matters more, the 60 or the 30

I went back and forth on this for a while, trying to decide whether the structure or the logic carried more weight. I finally realized that’s the wrong question. The 60 and the 30 are both the real work. They’re the deterministic part, the stuff you actually have to sit down and think through. The honest divide isn’t 60 against 30. It’s the 90 against the 10.

Everybody is pouring their energy into the 10%. Better prompts, newer models, the latest trick that’s going around this week. And the 10% does matter, but it’s the part that decays. Models change. Tools get swapped out. What survives all of that is the structure and the logic you built underneath. Patterns last. Tools don’t.

The other thing that landed for me is that this ratio isn’t only about software. It maps onto how you build a business the same way. The infrastructure is your systems, your contracts, your boring repeatable backbone. The orchestration is how each piece feeds the next one. The AI is the thing all of it quietly delivers at the end. Same ratio, different room.

So if you look up one day and notice you’ve spent all your time on the 10%, that’s the tell. The leverage was never sitting there. It’s in the 90% nobody wants to do, because that’s the part still standing after all the tools have changed.

We learn together we grow together we win together!

🤓💪🏆

Bas

13 comments