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You don't buy roads. You lay them.

How the AI you use every day actually works, in layers: models, harnesses, and the connective roads layer. And how ICM lets you lay those roads yourself with folders and plain markdown, no framework required.

5 parts / Hover to explore. Click to read.

How the AI you use every day actually works, in layers: models, harnesses, and the connective roads layer. And how ICM lets you lay those roads yourself with folders and plain markdown, no framework required.

Context + decisions + handoffs
               | ordinary files
               v
        receiving harness
        + tools + permissions
               |
          chosen model
               |
       inspect what transferred
Portable files carry the working agreement between tools. They do not supply missing runtime capabilities or solve high-concurrency coordination on their own.
roads starter, a minimal ICM workspace you can copy todayContext Pack (for agents)
A clean technical illustration of a city built in four stacked labelled layers: MODELS at the bottom, HARNESSES above it, ROADS connecting the storefront layer, and CITY GRID at the top where everything connects.
The city analogy: models supply capability, harnesses let them act, and portable context connects the work.

Changing AI tools is easy until you want the next one to understand the work you've already done.

The decisions, references and working instructions can be scattered across a conversation, a tool's settings and your own memory. A new model doesn't automatically inherit them. That is the part I want to make portable.

Separate the layers

Picture the setup as a city. The model is the land: the underlying capability to interpret and generate responses. To act on files, run a command or use a web search, it needs a surrounding system that exposes those tools and executes the calls.

That surrounding system is the harness, or the storefront in the analogy. It's usually the part you interact with when you say you're using an AI tool. It handles the conversation, tool access and other behaviour around the model.

The roads are the context and handoffs that let your work travel between these setups. A tool may offer integrations or export, but you still need a reliable way to carry the decisions the next stage depends on.

your context, ported
a chat tool
CONTEXT.md
a coding agent
agent C
agent D
one plot has context. the others are dark.

Put the portable part in ordinary files

ICM uses numbered stage folders and plain Markdown to hold that context. You can read the workflow without running it, change an instruction without building a new application, and hand the working material to someone else.

  • Copy the folder to move its context.
  • Open the Markdown to inspect or change the instructions.
  • Give a teammate the folder and the entry point for the next stage.

The portable core doesn't need its own platform or deployment. It doesn't mean every runtime capability moves with the files. The receiving tool still needs to read the format and have the tools and permissions required for the job.

Side by side: LEFT panel shows a tollgated highway with tools queuing to pay. RIGHT panel shows a hand-laid road made of markdown file cards connecting the same tools directly, no toll.
A folder can hold the context and stage contracts. The tools that execute them remain separate.

Build the next handoff on that structure

Once the inputs and expected outputs are visible, you can give independent stages to different models. You can ask a second model to check a result, or give two models the same question and compare their evidence.

build on your own road
SHARED STATE
_board.md
one board. tap to fan out parallel workers, each reading the same state.

Those arrangements don't necessarily need a framework. For a small workflow, readable files and explicit handoffs may be enough. Somebody or something still has to start the stages, respect their dependencies and inspect the results.

Know where folders stop helping

ICM doesn't claim to solve real-time coordination or high concurrency. Fifty agents exchanging messages at once need coordination machinery beyond a set of stage folders.

A lot of the work I'm describing is smaller: five stages and a human who wants to see what happened at each one. For that, a visible folder structure can be a useful place to begin.

You do not buy roads. You lay them.

Take one repeated workflow. Save its context, name each stage's input and output, and try handing one stage to a different tool. Check what transferred cleanly and what still needs an adapter.

That's how to find the part you can own today. Start with the route you actually need, and add coordination when the work requires it.

↓roads starter kit (markdown)

//A<3

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