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Welcome to Clief Notes. Here's where to start.
1. Watch the intro video and introduce yourself in the intro post here 2. Start with The Foundation (free course). Concepts, folder architecture, prompting framework. Everything else builds on this. 3. Check in at the bottom of each lesson. Polls, discussion posts, other members working through the same stuff. Use them. 4. When you're ready to build real things, move to Implementation Playbooks (Level 2). When you're ready to build your own tools, Building Your Stack (Level 3). 5. Post your work. Ask questions. Help others when you can. What are you here to build?
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📚 Big drop this week — both Tea sessions are out
The full hour-long session of afternoon tea is live on my YouTube. Anyone can watch it. Premium documents and prompts from session: Session 2 - 4/25/26 - The Vault · Clief Notes VIP session recording and documents are here: Session 4 - 4/25/2026 - The Drawing Room (VIP) · Clief Notes Two sessions this week and the artifact packages just landed for paid members. Here's what got covered so the whole community can see what's in each one. 🎩 VIP Session 4 — Replacement, Governance, and the Emerge Methodology 📦 @Marcin Hakemer-Fernandez asked if his language-learning app gets cloned in two months. We pulled in the Liquid Paper story (kitchen blender, sold to Gillette for $47.5M) and landed on the real question: are you building an AI company, or a company that uses AI? Different game, different moat. ⚖️ @Tiffany Coyle flagged a real consent gap on how AI platforms handle reporting. We walked through three actual 2026 cases: Italy fined OpenAI €15M, the EU Parliament banned Claude and Copilot internally, Microsoft confirmed a Copilot bug that exposed confidential email summaries for six weeks. Then the open-source escape hatch (Ollama, AnythingLLM, Open WebUI, Jan, OpenLLM, Spellbook ZDR) for anyone who needs privacy across every market. 👤Austin asked whether to build his name at his company or build his own. Answer: both. They're concentric circles. We worked through the Second-Order Problems Framework live — the move that lands authority faster than any pitch. 🌐 Plus the Emerge Conference build I covered for Matt (he was sick). 300+ branded websites in two days, 7M tokens burned, hosted free on GitHub Pages. Full methodology in the artifact package. 🔒 VIP members — the full Decision Map deck plus five companion MDs (Replacement and Framing Thesis, AI Governance Field Guide, Personal Brand and Second-Order Problems, Emerge Methodology, Term Sheet) are in the Drawing Room now. Recording's in there too.
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🏆 Weekly Comp #2: The Artifact Sprint 🏆
💰 Week 1 winner @Ian Barriopedro took home $200 cash. 🎟️ This week the prize gets bigger. ✨ Winner gets a FREE seat in The Lyceum. ✨ https://www.skool.com/quantum-quill-lyceum-1116/12-weeks-real-projects-250k-in-prizes-lets-talk?p=e850567b 🎯 Pick your cohort: Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. 📋 THE CHALLENGE: "The Returning Client" You just got hired again. Different client this time. Meet Marcus. 👋 📎 Download the full client brief attached to this post. 🛠️ YOUR DELIVERABLE An interactive artifact built in Claude that does what Marcus asked for. ✍️ Plus a 100 word writeup covering: - 👤 Who it's for - ⚙️ What it does - 🎨 One design choice you made and why 📐 THE RULES ✅ It has to work ✅ It has to sound like Marcus, not a bank ✅ The writeup matters ⚖️ Judging: Myself, Jake, and the mods. 🎟️ Who can enter: Premium and VIP members only. Free members, this is your sign. Upgrade and you're in the running for a Lyceum seat. 🚀 📨 How to submit: Drop a screen recording or screenshot of your artifact, the link if you've got one, and your writeup in the comments below. 📅 Deadline: Saturday, May 2nd at 12:00 PM EST 🎉 Winner announced: Monday, May 4th at 12:00 PM EST 💡 A note before you start. This isn't a finance challenge. It's a design and voice challenge. You don't need to be a CFP to win this. Read the brief. Marcus tells you exactly what he wants and how he thinks. Your job is to build something that solves his problem and sounds like him. 🆕 If you've never built an artifact in Claude before, this is a great first one. The brief is clear, the scope is reasonable, and the bar is "would Marcus actually send this to a prospect?" 🔥 @Ian Barriopedro set the standard last week. Your turn. LFG 🚀
Who's here? Drop your intro.
Tell us three things: 1. What you do (job, industry, student, career-changer, whatever) 2. What brought you to Clief Notes 3. One thing you're trying to figure out right now related to computing or AI I'll respond to every single one. And read each other's intros too because the person who's stuck on the same problem as you might already be in this thread. I'll go first I am Jake, I have been working in tech for 15 Years, building with Generative AI for 3 Years straight now! Excited to teach and learn! That's it. Simple, scannable, gives you data on who's joining and what they need, and keeps the feed clear for content that retains people past week one.
As promised: The six-section brief that replaced every long chat prompt I wrote
Long prompts decay. You keep stuffing context into one chat window until the model is drowning in your own mess. The fix is not a better prompt. It is a brief written to disk. A brief is a contract. Any worker opens it cold, executes, hands back a result. No shared history. No "as we discussed earlier." The doc is the entire relationship. Here is the template I use. Six sections. Every brief has them. In this order. # <slug> cd <absolute path the worker starts in> ## Task One paragraph. The outcome. What "done" looks like in prose. ## Context Paths to files the worker needs. The spec. The design doc. The prior handoff. Anything not obvious from the codebase. ## Scope - In-scope: what the worker is allowed to touch - Out-of-scope: what the worker must not touch - Kill-switches: time or complexity thresholds that trigger a fallback ## Acceptance - Binary bullets. Either true or false. - Test counts. Commit messages. Evidence file path. - No subjective language. "Looks good" is not acceptance. ## Escalation One file path. If the worker hits ambiguity, it writes a question to this file and exits. Main session reads it on the next turn. ## Returns-with - Commit SHAs - Test pass count before and after - Wall-clock per major task - Final handoff doc path Why each section load-bears Task forces you to state the outcome in prose before a single line of code exists. If you cannot state it, the work is not ready to dispatch. Context is the line between a clean run and a hallucinated one. Never rely on the worker guessing which file you meant. Name the paths. Scope stops the worker sliding into adjacent work. In-scope is the yes list. Out-of-scope is the no list. Both matter. Kill-switches protect you from a worker burning six hours on the wrong branch. Acceptance is the section most people skip. Binary only. If you cannot write acceptance criteria, the work is not shaped yet. You are not ready to brief. Escalation is the pressure release valve. Without it, a stuck worker invents nonsense. With it, the worker writes a question file and exits clean. You read it on your next turn. No wasted tokens.
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Jake Van Clief, giving you the Cliff notes on the new AI age.
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