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Glad you made it in. Before you go anywhere else, work through the steps below. They will get you set up and ready to start. ✅ Introduce yourself in the comments. Tell us what you do and why you are here. ✅ Watch the Getting Started overview 📚Navigating The Course - Getting Started · Clief Notes ✅ Start with the Foundation course 0.1: Where All Of This Leads - The Foundation · Clief Notes ✅ Fill out your profile so people know who you are ✅ Join the next competition ⭐ Competitions Mega Thread - Getting Started · Clief Notes ⭐ On Competitions (and why I love them) We host a competition every two weeks. These are some of the most powerful places to learn and build here. Also Cash prices (often over $200) for the winners. Learning how to do something is one part of it. The real learning starts when you put it to work. That is what the competitions and the build sessions are for. On top of this they act as a portfolio a place to not just show us but show others (clients, bosses, your best friend) what you have been building and that you really CAN build. In order to win a competition you must be a paying member (It takes me hours to review submissions sometimes days. But if you win ONCE you can pay for a whole year of membership so I think that's only fair!) Watch the videos, then go make something.
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🎆 THE LAST SALE EVER — HELP US GET TO VEGAS 🎆
🎯 WE READ ALL OF YOUR RESPONSES. HERE'S WHAT'S NEXT (AND A BIG ASK) A couple weeks ago we asked you what you wanted Clief Notes to become. You showed up. You wrote real, thoughtful answers, some of you wrote essays. We read every single one. Twice. So before anything else: thank you. This post is us answering you. 💬 YOU TOLD US. HERE'S WHAT WE'RE BUILDING. You said you want a clearer path from learning ICM to actually getting paid for it. → It's coming. A real learning-to-earning track, plus a talent platform we're building to connect you with people who want to hire what you can do. Heads up: the talent platform will be Premium and VIP only, one more reason to lock in below. You said competitions without feedback don't help you grow. → Fixed. Going forward, every single entrant gets tailored feedback on their build, not just the winner. We're moving to two competitions a month so we can do it right. And both monthly winners get a 30-minute call with me. You said the best builds get buried in the feed. → We're building a tagged library so you can actually find "ICM setups for solo operators" or "small team, non-coder" instead of scrolling for an hour. You said you couldn't map all the pieces, Skool, Discord, the Lyceum, ICM, what each tier unlocks. → A single orientation page is on the way. One place that breaks all of it down so nobody's lost. You said you want to connect with each other. → We hear you. Meetups, pairing, and a recorded "After Tea" hangout are on the table. South Florida alone has over 1,000 of you. Let's use that. You said we've felt spread thin. → The most honest one. You're right. We're bringing on real help to run the day-to-day so the community gets consistency, and so Matt and I can keep building the things above instead of dropping balls. You called it, and we're fixing it. 📍 QUICK NOTE ON ICM: a few of you asked for "ICM with Copilot" or "ICM with n8n, Sheets, GoHighLevel." Good news, ICM already works with any model and feeds straight into the tools you're using. It's the structure underneath all of them, not a separate thing you have to relearn per tool. If that's not landing for you, that's on us to make clearer, and we will.
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Sneak Peak at the platform we are building
This is a devlog from David! A lot of people are saying they want the ability to scale and deploy their ICM and their workflows. We looked at all the possible problems security issues and we have been spending a lot of time building something for all of you! It's almost ready for release, but here's a little developers log to kind of check out some things that David has been doing to build it up. It's far from perfect, but for those technical folks out there you may enjoy it!
🚨 UPDATE: FIXED IT! 🤖 Local LLM + VS Code = Not Autonomous (Yet?) | OpenCode vs. Claude Code
It turns out this wasn't an architectural limitation of VS Code extensions—it was a combination of using a model that was too small for agentic tasks, and a misconfigured context window that was suffocating my hardware. Here is exactly what I was doing wrong and how to fix it to get that true "Claude Code" autonomous experience locally: 1. The Model was Too Small for Tool-Calling I was using qwen2.5-coder:latest (which defaults to the 7B version). The 7B model is great for fast autocomplete, but it is fundamentally too small to reliably format the hidden JSON tool calls required to autonomously read and write files. The Fix: I switched to qwen3-coder:30b (an agent-tier model). The qwen2.5-coder:32b-instruct-q4_K_M would have also worked perfectly. Once you cross that 30B parameter threshold, the model is smart enough to actually use the VS Code extension's file-system tools on its own. 2. The Context Window was Crashing My RAM Even with the 30B model, it was initially taking over 3 minutes to read a file. Why? Because the VS Code extension (and Ollama GUI) was defaulting to an insane 256k-token context window. - Asking a 30B model to hold 256k tokens of memory caused its size to balloon to 45GB. - It overflowed my 32GB of RAM, spilled entirely onto my SSD pagefile, and bogged down my CPU trying to swap data. The Fix: I clamped the maximum context window down to 32k tokens. The model now runs flawlessly at 20GB, fits entirely inside my physical RAM and GPU VRAM, and operates at blazing-fast speeds. Conclusion: Yes, you absolutely can get that autonomous, repo-wide Claude Code experience locally in VS Code for free. You just need a 30B+ model and strict context window management! The Setup: I installed OpenCode extension in VS Code with Continue running qwen2.5-coder:latest locally. My goal: get that Claude Code autonomous agent experience (where the LLM reads files, writes code, runs commands, delivers results) but inside VS Code with a local model.
🚨 UPDATE: FIXED IT! 🤖 Local LLM + VS Code = Not Autonomous (Yet?) | OpenCode vs. Claude Code
Player 2 has joined Clief Notes
I’ve managed to convince one of my closest friends @David Chalk to come join us and learn stuff. I’m saying he’s player 2, because I was totally here first, but in real life where we’re pretty similar he keeps reminding me he is the original… Some of you may remember him as my friend who gives me “frank facts”. 🤣 I have promised to help build an ICM system to help him with some things and encouraged him to get some information directly from the source… because he’s totally going to want this built in a way that works for him. So, short version, please be kind to him and help me say hi. I am willing to open predictions on how long it takes for him to come up with good sim racing use cases for ICM while hanging out with this community… I don’t think it will take very long. Also… are we actually some kind of AI cult? Asking for a friend.
Player 2 has joined Clief Notes
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