Notice who AI writes for by default. It writes for someone who already understands the topic. Dense, complete, technically correct, and close to useless for the actual reader who's meeting the thing for the first time. i catch it instantly, because i spend my days writing for people who don't know the thing yet. The fix isn't "make it simpler." That just flattens everything into baby talk and strips out the parts that mattered. The fix is telling the model who's reading and what they don't know. The habit: before you ask for any explainer, write one line about the reader. "This is for a new hire who's never seen our tools and is a little nervous about asking a dumb question." Watch what changes. The model stops performing competence and starts actually teaching. We spend so much energy telling the AI who it is. The bigger lever is telling it who it's talking to. When you ask for an explanation, do you ever tell the model who's going to read it?

This post is not for the ICM pro, there will be no talk of gates, scripts, or orchestration! This is for the person just starting out! @Karli Rosario Yes, I mean you! (And anyone else who may just be starting out with ICM) Seriously, I'm glad you found ICM. Let me give you the simplest version of it I know. ICM is a system of structured folders. Yes, the same folders you have been using on a computer for most of your life. The ones you stored photos in, & pirated music from Napster and LimeWire. That's it. I will take you through the process below. When working with AI, a lot of people are doing this 👇 You take a long prompt, feed the entire thing to AI at the beginning of your interaction, and spend time going back and forth with AI trying to get the outcome you want. (I'm not coming for you Karli, you are exceptionally good at this, but ICM will make your outcomes exceptionally better!) What is different about AI and prompting with ICM 👇 You take that same really long prompt and instead of giving it to the AI all at once in the beginning, you break it into steps, and each step gets its own folder, each folder gets its own piece of your large prompt, just 1 step from it, and you ordered the folders by when the steps happen in the workflow. You got it? Good 😊 ❤️‍🔥 -------------------Still a bit unclear, let's bake a cake. 💡 Here's an analogy I have success with (I picked this up way back in my VB programming days): Imagine teaching AI to bake a birthday cake. 🎂 The way most people do it: 👇 One giant prompt. "Bake a cake, here's the recipe, the frosting technique, the decorating style, the candle placement..." Then they hit enter and wait. The AI is juggling 40 instructions at once, and by step 30 it's forgotten step 3. The ICM way: 👇 Break the prompt/workflow into steps. Each step gets a folder. The first folder is your first step. Then you point the AI at the first step, and the first step is 00-birthday-cake: (Point the AI just means giving access to the folders to the AI, through uploading or direct local access, don't worry about that now, let's keep building our cake.)

Hey everyone, Paul here. I wanted to share where I'm at and lean on the collective brain in this room. By day I'm a clinical data science lead in pharma - the kind of role where my "job description" is basically a small anthology. I'm across clinical data management, EDC builds, protocol and CRF work, SDTM datasets, sponsor interactions, and a lot of cross-functional fire-fighting. It's a mission-driven organization and I care a lot about the work. On top of that, I'm trying to really learn the sponsor management side of the industry while leveling up on AI/ML and agentic workflows so I can bring more structure and leverage into our development programs. Here's the honest part: I'm genuinely excited about all of it. The possibilities feel huge. I'm also struggling to focus, and I've gotten a bit gun-shy about shipping my first real ICM build. I've been playing with a bunch of ideas, drafting files, sketching workflows, and spinning up partial architectures... but I keep stalling right before I commit to, "this is the first build I'm going to ship and actually use." It's not lack of interest. It's that my world is wide, and every time I pick one use case, ten others raise their hand. Then I start second-guessing whether I chose the "right" one. I see how people here go from foundations to real systems, and it's both inspiring and a little intimidating. So instead of staying in my own head, I'd love to ask directly: Q: What actually keeps you focused when your work covers a lot of ground? (Vote below, and share more in the comments!)