I Was A Broke Marine On Dial-Up. The System Never Changed.

Ryan “RyMac” McKinney · USMC · 14 August 2026 · 6 minute read

Everybody wants the origin story to be clever. Mine is just a guy who could not afford software, typing into a text file, and getting it wrong in public for 20 years.

2006. A secondhand tower and a phone line.

I was broke and in the Marine Corps. I had a computer somebody else did not want anymore and an internet connection you could hear.

I taught myself to make words bold in a text document. Not because I wanted to be technical. Because anything with a logo on it cost money I did not have.

The loop went like this. Type the page. Upload it. Wait.

And the waiting was real waiting. The bar would crawl. I would go to formation, come back, and it would still be going. It could take days before a page was actually live on the internet.

Then I would look at it. And there it was. The typo. In the headline. Every single time.

Type. Upload. Wait. Curse. Repeat.

What that actually taught me.

Not patience. I want to be honest about that, because patience is the answer people expect.

What it taught me is that the thing that survives is the file.

The connection dropped. The host changed. The software I could not afford went out of business twice. None of that mattered, because the words lived in a text file on my desk, and a text file does not care what year it is.

Everything I have built since is downstream of that one accident.

20 years later, the same 2 files.

Today I run several businesses. Offers, clients, content, operations, follow-up. The boring machinery nobody makes a reel about.

The operating system underneath all of it is text files in folders.

The only thing that changed is that there is now 1 AI agent sitting at the desk with me, and it can read.

~/business/
├── CLAUDE.md          <- the map. 11 lines. points at Context.md
├── Context.md         <- the desk. what we're doing today
└── ops/
    ├── clients/
    ├── offers/
    ├── sops/
    └── archive/

That is the whole operating system. A map, a desk, and the material.

I ask for something. The agent reads the map. The map points at 1 text file. That file says which folder the work lives in. It brings me the folder. We work. It puts the folder back.

The method has a name. Interpretable Context Methodology, ICM for short, and it is not mine. Jake Van Clief and David McDermott wrote the paper on it. I am the guy running it in public.

The video I should probably take down.

When I started making videos, I was bad at it. Not modest-bad. Actually bad.

This one is from my first 30 days. The audio is what it is. The pacing is worse. I knew less than I know now and it shows in about 40 different places.

30 days in. Bored in a camper in the mountains with a broken AC and 2 dogs, and I could not write a line of code. Yes, I know how it sounds. Leaving it up on purpose.

I leave it up for the same reason I am telling you about the typos.

Everybody selling you a system shows you the finished version. The polished one. The one where they already knew the answer. And then you compare your messy first attempt to their edited hundredth one and quietly conclude you are not built for this.

You are. It just looks like that at the start. It looked like that for me on dial-up and it looked like that on camera.

Why I am telling you this at all.

Because the thing I am giving away is unimpressive on purpose.

It is 2 text files and some empty folders. There is no platform. Nothing to log into. No monthly anything.

People struggle with that, and I understand why. If the answer were really this small, the 5 grand you spent on a course about agent swarms would have to mean something uncomfortable.

So do not take my word for it. Run 1 week of real work through the folders and compare. I would rather you beat me with evidence than believe me on vibes.

If you want me to sit down and build the whole operation with you, I am in my free community every day, doing it in public, including the parts that do not work.