🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. ---- 🇺🇸 Quick note first. This post is going up Today because we took Memorial Day off yesterday. To keep things fair, you've got until Sunday May 31st at 12:00 PM EST to submit. Same week of build time, just shifted. ---- 📋 THE CHALLENGE Build a folder-based AI researcher for a specific topic or industry. You pick the domain. This week's deliverable is one researcher folder that someone could drop into a Claude project and use as their personal research partner for whatever domain you've built it for. ---- 🎯 PICK YOUR DOMAIN The domain is yours. Pick something specific. Pick something you'd actually use. A few sparks to get you thinking: - 🏦 M&A activity in one industry (fintech, healthcare, defense) - ⚖️ Court cases in one area of law (employment, IP, immigration) - 🧬 Scientific research on one health condition or treatment - 🏘️ Real estate market dynamics in one city or asset class - 🥊 Competitive intelligence for one product category - 📜 Historical research on one period, place, or movement - 📚 Academic literature in one specific subfield - 📋 Regulatory developments in one sector - 📰 Journalism research on one beat (climate tech, AI policy, biotech funding) The more specific, the better. "Research assistant" is too broad. "M&A research analyst for early-stage fintech deals in the US and Europe" is right. ---- 🗂️ THE METHODOLOGY If this is your first comp, welcome. Here's what you need to know: This week (and every week) you're learning interpretable context methodology. Folders as architecture. Each file does one job well. Your researcher is a folder with five things: - 📄 identity.md (who the researcher is, what domain they cover) - 📐 rules.md (how they research) - 💬 examples.md (what good looks like) - 📚 reference/ (frameworks, source lists, key concepts) - 📖 README.md (how to use it)

If you've been in this community for a minute, you've heard the term thrown around. ICM, Interpretable Context Methodology. Maybe you've seen it in Jake's lessons. Maybe you saw someone's folder structure screenshot and thought "that looks organized, but I have no idea what I'm looking at." 😅 I'm going to break it down the way I wish someone had broken it down for me. What ICM actually is (in plain English) 📂 ICM is a way of organizing your AI work, so the AI only sees what it needs to see, when it needs to see it. That's it. Instead of dumping everything into one massive prompt or letting a framework manage your context behind the scenes, you use your filesystem, folders, markdown files, plain text, as the architecture itself. Each folder is a stage. Each stage has one job. A CONTEXT.md file at the top tells the agent what this stage is, what inputs it expects, and what output it should produce. The agent walks into the room, reads the brief on the wall, does its job, and leaves. The next stage picks up the output. No frameworks. No LangChain. No AutoGen. Just folders and files. 🗂️ If you want to understand the philosophy behind why this works, where all of this leads, Jake lays the foundation here: 0.1: Where All Of This Leads - The Foundation Why it matters 🎯 Most people hitting a wall with AI aren't hitting a model limitation. They're hitting a context problem. The AI is trying to hold too much in its head at once. It forgets things. It contradicts itself. It hallucinates. It gets "lazy." 😴 That's not the AI being bad. That's you giving it a 47-page brief and asking it to stay sharp on page 43. ICM fixes that by isolating context. Each stage only loads what's relevant. The AI stays focused because you've structurally made it impossible for it to get distracted. The 60/30/10 rule (the lens behind it all) 🔍 This is the framework under the framework. Jake breaks every system into three layers: