5 OpenClaw agents run my home, finances, and code | Jesse Genet

Jesse Genet is a homeschooling parent and entrepreneur who runs her household with five specialized OpenClaw agents. She layers them on top of her Obsidian “second brain,” deploys each on its own Mac Mini, and assigns every agent a distinct role—homeschool, finance, scheduling, development, and operations—so each one operates with clear scope and responsibility. What you’ll learn: How Jesse set up five OpenClaw agents, each with its own role, persona, SOUL.md file, and dedicated Mac MiniThe workflow for photographing an entire curriculum book and having an agent generate formatted, ready-to-teach lesson plans from the imagesUsing a coding agent to build a custom kids’ TV app from scratch and ship it to a real television in four days (with zero prior terminal experience)Why Jesse treats agent onboarding like employee onboardingThe “decision file” trick and other incantations for managing agents that actually stickWhere multi-agent collaboration breaks down, and why no current messaging platform handles agent-to-agent handoffs wellHow photographing every toy, book, and supply in the house lets the AI recommend real physical materials during lesson planningThe hands-free printing loop that took Jesse from scan → upload → email → print to “Sylvie, print this” in 30 seconds flat— Brought to you by: Optimizely https://www.optimizely.com/howIAI—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Jesse and her “after Claw” life (02:30) Layering OpenClaw on top of Obsidian (04:44) Logging homeschool lessons automatically (07:12) Turning books into a structured curriculum (13:09) Using SOUL.md files to give each agent a personality (14:39) Running multiple specialized AI agents (16:43) Agent collaboration (18:19) Partitioning data across Mac Minis (27:00) Building a custom YouTube app with AI (37:00) Creating a physical inventory from cupboard photos (41:00) Printing from voice: reducing friction (44:00) Managing agent memory and decision files — Tools referenced: • OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/ • Obsidian: https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md/ • Slack: https://slack.com https://slack.com/ • QuickBooks: https://quickbooks.intuit.com https://quickbooks.intuit.com/ • Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • Mac Mini: https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/ — Other references: • Claude Code for product managers: research, writing, context libraries, custom to-do system, and more | Teresa Torres: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/claude-code-for-product-managers — Where to find Jesse Genet: X: https://x.com/jessegenet LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessegenet/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  What brought you to the lobster agent we know and love?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Because I follow these Obsidian influencers, one of them buried in a comment on a day where I was just scrolling was like, "Game changer is layering on to your Obsidian and actually having an agent who like uses your files for you." And I was like, "Whoa, what is that?" At first I thought like, "I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer. Like, I don't know what I'm doing." But then I jumped in. This is really interesting. I want to figure this out and I want to run my homeschool this way, so maybe this can help.

• 0:30Claire Vo?

  You're trying to get all this stuff organized and you thought, "Man, if AI could do this for me, then I could actually get done what I wanted."

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain, right? But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain because I have four little kids. I didn't really have time to develop this second brain.

• 0:46Claire Vo?

  People just don't appreciate how much it unlocks for folks that do have this ambition to really be there for their family and kids and also get all sorts of cool stuff done. And I feel the same revolution in my relationship with time.

• 1:01Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clara Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Jessie Janay, who has four kids and five OpenClaw Mac minis sitting on her desk, helping her run everything from her homeschool to her finances. Jessie has established there are two phases now, before Claw and after Claw, and she is going to show us the future of what an after Claw life looks like. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Most marketing teams aren't short on ideas, but what they are short on is time. And that's exactly what Optimizely Opal gives you back. With AI agents that handle real marketing workflows.

• 1:45Claire Vo?

  You know, like creating content and checking compliance, generating experiment variations, personalizing user experiences, analyzing pages for GEO, even tasks like approvals and reporting. It's your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams. Plugging seamlessly into the tools you already use, handling the boring busy work and keeping everything on brand. That leaves marketers with more time to do your actual job. See what Opal can automate for your team by signing up for a free Enterprise Agentic AI workshop with Optimizely. Find out more at optimizely.com/HowIAI.

• 2:26Claire Vo?

  Attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses. Jessie, I am excited that you're here because you are the OpenClaw influencer I didn't know that I needed in my timeline. I, you know, it's been very crypto bro adjacent energy in the, in the Claw thing. And so I like that we got the two ladies of OpenClaw basically here on the podcast. And I think your use cases are so interesting and I love what you figured out. So tell me, what brought you to the lobster agent we know and love? Why did you get started with this?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Well, you're, you're right. It wasn't because I really wanted to segment all my marketing, which is like what I see over and over in my feed from like a bunch of tech guys. I have been, I've actually been using this product called Obsidian for a while. So this is like my, like how I even learned about it because I learned about it like over a month ago now, which is kind of like ancient history in like Claw land, right? But the reason is because I follow some people who are like deep users of this second brain product called Obsidian, which is like a collection of markdown files and we can get more into that. But because I follow these Obsidian influencers, one of them like buried in a comment on a day where I was just scrolling was like game changer

• 3:50Speaker 01

  is layering Claude Bot, which it was called at the time, onto your Obsidian and actually having an agent who like uses your files for you. And I was like, whoa, what is that? Because I've been trying to organize my homeschool in Obsidian, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the time to log properly all my stuff. And I'm like running into all these roadblocks of actually using it because I don't have any time because I'm a mom. So, so that was my discovery moment was seeing this person say that. And I was like, what does that mean? I went and looked up like what Claude Bot was, which is now called Open Claw and I at first I felt like I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer like I don't know what I'm doing.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  But then I jumped in and I'm sure you had a bunch of like snafus. I was reading your tweets about some of them and I had my own. But um, but that was like my jump in moment like this is really interesting. I want to figure this out. And I want to run my homeschool this way. So maybe this can help.

• 4:47Claire Vo?

  So you were running your homeschool partially on Obsidian. And you know, we've actually had a couple of episodes on Obsidian. Teresa Torres did one on Obsidian and Claude Claude, how she's running her own. Um, so like personal brain off of it. But you're trying to get all this stuff organized and you thought, man, if AI could do this for me, then I could actually get done what I wanted. So. Do you want to show us what that brain looked like and then where kind of Open Claw layered on top?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain, right? But um, the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain. Okay. Because I have four little kids. Um, so I didn't really have time to develop this second brain. Um, and so my, so we're in my Obsidian now. Okay. And I call my vault, um, Obsidian is structured on vault. I call my vault family learning. And the reason I actually titled it that was that we like, I want to, I want to track almost everything that's even vaguely educational about my kid's life. Like even if we go on a trip or something. So I track more than just like lessons in here. But we can, we can get to that. But the, the core structure. Is that I've been trying to get to that Open Claw finally like allows me to get to because it's actually doing the heavy lifting.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Is I try to log all the little lessons and different things that I do with the kids. And so, um, but I don't have time. To go in here and write all this structured data. So I want to know the date we did it. I want to know who's the instructor. Which children of mine, um, out of the four of them were like included in that lesson? What was taught? Um, what might come like next? Uh, notes that we have. And so here's my kids like learning about the color wheel and like matching colors and stuff like that. And the vibe that I wanted was to be able to take photos of a lesson that I do. And then basically just upload them and have the actual Open Claw log the full lesson contents. And it's not just because I'm an obsessive record keeper, although maybe that accusation is fair.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  But it's also because I want to be able to use AI to plan curriculum. So if the AI knows I did this like, you know, cool pattern matching thing with number blocks, then it can suggest, now I'm just taking a cute picture of my kids, this is like a greeting. Then it can suggest that maybe, it seems like Quinn nailed the, you know, pattern blocks, who is my oldest, but maybe Elle, who is like two, clearly like isn't quite there. And it can actually track their progression over time and actually help me build curriculum off of that. So we've got all these logs, we have curriculum, curriculum sources also, like, for instance, I love the BFSU, like the specific science curriculum. And so I track that as a curriculum source.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And then my open claw, again, this used to be so manual for me. I was like trying to type in chapters of the book and all this stuff. But what I did is actually take photos of the entire book and maybe that's in my photos. Yeah, you can, okay, yeah, like here, I actually, um, once I realized the power of open claw, I started taking photos of entire books, like, uh, and actually giving the entire book to my open claw. So they could help me build more detailed curriculum. So.

• 7:52Claire Vo?

  Okay, can we take a pause?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:54Claire Vo?

  Cause let's go back to photos. Every parent loves this Teach Your Kid to Read in 180 Lessons. I have this book, it has gone through two children already. And part of the challenge of this book, this is going to be very niche parenting content.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:09Claire Vo?

  It is very niche. Actually hard to know if you're teaching this book well. Even though I have this very dense upfront introduction about how you're supposed to teach it.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:19Claire Vo?

  I always didn't feel confident about, was I teaching it correctly? Was I saying those, those, um, phone names correctly? And it's such a brilliant idea to take a photo of all this and build even a lesson plan that just I could understand. So this is, I just want to pause and tell people, this is such a great workflow to just take a book or reference material, take lots of photos of it, maybe have your kids take photos of it.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, delegate that. This is what we're out with OpenClaw is delegate everything. But, but I have, okay, so I have even more niche ideas off of this one book that I want to do that I, that I, we can talk about what I've done with OpenClaw, but there's a couple of things I want to do that I think I can do that I'm getting closer to. And one is this book has special letter forms for helping teach your kids like, has like a TH that is connected for teaching them the sound "duh", for instance. And so I'm actually thinking of 3D printing all of the letter forms from this book. So I can then actually like spell out letters that, in words, to give my kids like in a physical lesson that match the letter forms in the book. There's like things that I want to do to bring this curriculum kind of like out of this one environment.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Um, or take the stories, like my kids like these little stories in the book. Um, but if you notice, the story is kind of like buried amongst all this other text. And I just feel like sometimes they find it hard to focus on like this like see me eat and they're like distracted by everything else on the page. So I was thinking, what if I could extract that like story um, from the book using OpenClaw? And maybe make like printouts of the story like as a little booklet or something. Just, just ways to actually make this book kind of come alive. But again, I have all these hopes and dreams, but I'm also actually homeschooling mom before. So I really need OpenClaw to do the heavy lifting for this thing. Like I need it to do it. I can't actually do it.

• 10:11Claire Vo?

  Okay, so I interrupted you with niche phonics mom aside here. But what you were saying is you want to bring in a bunch of reference material as well into Obsidian. And one thing that's nice about AI in general is that you can just do that in a kind of unstructured form. You just take pictures. But then what are you doing with that?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  So this is the layout that I, that I've kind of created. So curriculum source is something like that book, like teach your kids to read in 100. And that's a source. And, and I, and there's so many brilliant sources available to us as parents, right? So I don't need to reinvent the wheel all the time. So that's a curriculum source. Then there's actually curriculum, um, which is like progressions of lessons I'm coming up with and lesson plans. So this, okay, so for instance, I have that curriculum source of the Basic fundamentals of scientific understanding, that acronym is BFSU. And then these are the lesson plans from that book. Okay, so these are all just, these are lesson plans I generated off of each chapter of the book. Okay, so it gives me, it pulls into a lesson plan, the actual objectives of that lesson,

• 11:14Speaker 01

  the key concepts and vocabulary, the materials I need to do activities are suggested in the book. And then, let's take it to another level. So this helps me because instead of just sitting down and reading the chapter, I can kind of cut to the chase and like be like, okay, but I'm actually going to teach it tomorrow. Let's like get this ready and I actually can see the materials I need to pull out and all this stuff. And then what I'm really getting into that is very OpenClaw related is actually asking my OpenClaw to help me generate completely custom materials. So I'll make this real. We just did yesterday this B-six, how animals move skeleton and muscles. And last week we did this adaptations and survival about how animal, like what it takes for animals to survive. Let me go over to Slack and you can see me interacting a little bit with my OpenClaw.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I was like, okay, I want watercolor illustrations suitable for kids that can print on eight and a half by 11 of each of these concepts. And by the way, here's the concepts. Here's my finger, like with a book page of like these nine concepts of what it takes for an animal to survive on its own in the wild. And it's kind of trying to make it real for people. Like this is how lo-fi I'm going. Like I just take a picture of a snippet of that book. And then I ask it to use now a banana pro and I gave it, that's a Gemini, a Google Gemini AI product. And so I had to give the API key for that specific image generation model to my OpenClaw. But then it made these files. Look how gorgeous these are.

• 12:39Claire Vo?

  Oh, they're so beautiful.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Tear out, but I think it's because I'm also postpartum. But I'm like, look at how beautiful this owl is.

• 12:45Claire Vo?

  Oh my god.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  But, but like, okay, I, I just want to explain that my prompt was like make, let me go back to it. Was just like make watercolor style illustrations suitable for kids that can print on eight and a half by 11 paper for each of these concepts. Okay? Like. I just, I just, I just don't know. I just want everyone to sit with this for a moment. Like, how basic is that? Like, how basic is that? Now, the other real thing I want to share is that in the, um, this Sylvie, okay? So I'm talking to Sylvie. I have five different open claws spun out because I am insane. Okay, we'll cover that more. But Sylvie is my homeschool oriented open claw. I'm trying to like make Sylvie from her, like the soul, there's this soul.md file.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I'm trying to make her into like the most magnificent teacher like the world has ever seen. So she's like always really creative and like really bubbly and has like really, um, like she's just really into kids like learning, right? So, because that's like her personality, that's what I want her to be like. And so she's adding a layer like from her soul.md file, I think of like how to make these images like actually really stand out for children. So it's a combo of like my basic prompt to her and her own like injection of like, "Okay, but we really need to make these concepts pop for the children," you know?

• 14:02Claire Vo?

  Can I ask a question for you? Because I think, you know, some people that are going to be listening to this episode are going to be, um, open claw pilled and have them set up and be working on Telegram or something super shady just to like talk to their AI. And then some of them are going to be really new to this concept because I think what you're talking about is very accessible to parents, to students, to teachers, to actually anybody doing business, is all these concepts of how can you log your day in a structured way? How can you take one piece of content and turn it into another piece of content? How can you create great visuals? Those are all applicable across a lot of use cases. But you just said you have five agents. You sort of like glossed over that as if that's easy. How do you technically set that up in OpenClaw?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So I would say agents collaboration is one of the hardest things that I'm still hacking on. Um, so this will be really blunt and, and I will explain a couple foundational elements. So first, coming over back to Obsidian, in this, in this, um, it's maybe a little hard to see, but in this bottom corner, I'm in the family's learning vault, but one way I partitioned the scope and role of each of the agents that I've spun up is that they have a role in my life. Like I have someone, uh, and by someone, I mean an open claw, like, because sometimes I talk about them, like their literature, she meant, and I have actually confused people. They're like, "Wait, are these employees, are these people, what is going on?"

• 15:29Speaker 01

  So Sylvie is the open claw, where I focus on homeschool content, curriculum generation, logging. She only has access to this family learning vault, okay? I then have an agent, Finn West, I don't know, I'm just taking these names at random, okay? Who is focused on accounting and like, I send him all my receipts and I'm trying to have him help me stay organized financially. He has access to this family office vault. So, I'm kind of sharing a version of like provisioning agents. I have five because I want them to all have very separate personas with separate responsibilities. And that makes it worth it to me to have multiple agents, okay?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  If you just want to create kind of an EA agent who helps you a little bit with homeschool and a little bit with that, with this and that, that's not wrong or bad either, but I really wanted to go deep and actually make, it would be kind of weird if Sylvie, who's like, "My whole purpose in life is to teach kids beautiful information," was like, if I sent her my receipts, I would almost feel like I'm being rude. Like, I'd be like, "This is beneath Sylvie, you know, like, she needs to focus on the children." So, that's part of why I have created multiple agents. Now, I am trying to work towards a path where my agents collaborate to like, make my life even more autonomous. Like, it'd be really cool if Claire, who's my more like EA-ish, like scheduling and

• 16:57Speaker 01

  scheduling and my time management, ordering groceries and things like this, it'd be cool if Claire could like, talk to Sylvie effectively and help plan out maybe my lessons for the week and like, tell Claire, like, "Oh, tell Sylvie, oh, she can't do that time because she has a doctor appointment." But this is a little bit, I'm not quite there. To be honest, I moved all my agents to Slack because Cole is working on dev projects, anyway.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  So Cole is my dev AI, but I have them all in Slack because I thought Slack would be better for collaboration because it's like a human collaboration tool. But to be perfectly frank, I believe now, after spending more than a week with five agents, that there are no one communication channel that is native to OpenClaw, meaning what you're talking about Telegram, Slack, iMessage, Signal, is actually very good for agent-to-agent collaboration.

• 17:51Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Because all of these tools have been made for humans to use and agents are kind of like hacking into them from the side. Like in order to even add my OpenClaw to Slack, this is one of the worst, like the, one of the hardest components of my OpenClaw setup for each agent was creating a custom Slack app to add the agent as a bot into my Slack. So I just want to be really blunt, like that was really hard. Like that was harder than creating the OpenClaw itself. And so...

• 18:19Claire Vo?

  To create the OpenClaw yourself, are you asking OpenClaw to create a new agent? Are you spinning up a new install? How do you do that?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  So basically, here's my, here's my team.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I just thought that I had the, like the turnaround. I have literally a Mac Mini box that's sitting on my desk. That's what I was sitting my laptop on. This is where I'm at. Okay. Like this is, people need to know, like people need, like, it's like a send help to Jesse's house kind of situation. Like if you don't hear from me for a while, is this necessary? No. And even financially, I want to like address, I recognize I'm able to afford these Mac Mini's. Already that's like a lot of money, just generally speaking.

• 19:00Claire Vo?

  I was not expecting this, by the way.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Okay. You can, you can run more than one OpenClaw on a Mac Mini. I'll even explain, why do I have so many sitting on my desktop? One reason is I'm trying to partition their worlds completely.

• 19:16Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  So for instance, Finn, who's going to handle financial stuff. Again, this maybe just makes you seem so insane, but I run a full QuickBooks instance for our family's personal finance because I love that, because I'm such a super geek. So that means every expense is categorized and all this stuff, but that means there's a lot of sensitive information I want Finn to have. Like, he's not going to get access to my bank accounts to like use, but I'm going to give him read-only access to all bank statements, all sorts of stuff. So like, a lot of information. I frankly don't want that information sitting on the same Mac Mini as like Claire, who's the OpenClaw's doing scheduling. I don't want her to accidentally like send like some information from a bank statement to like the kid's piano teacher, like just because she's texting with her

• 20:02Speaker 01

  or something. So that's why I have separate Mac Minis. Now, there are other ways to partition agents. This is kind of my lazy way, like just being perfectly frank. Like, there's other ways to partition them, but I'm just trying to be like overly cautious because there are security concerns with with OpenClaw and I want to make sure that I like have this actual like physical environment for each one to live in for right now.

• 20:23Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I want to call this out for folks that that maybe missed that, which is the physical partitioning of different Mac Minis is great. And then each instance is in a file system. So you do have to think really carefully about what file system you're putting any of these agents in. And then what I like about what you're doing is you're partitioning them by access, both to data and to input-output, which is like, that's very smart to say, "I'll give you access to all my bank accounts," or "bank account statements," highly risky, but you can't talk to anybody. So it's not going anywhere.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And Finn doesn't have any communication channel except Slack. He can't get out of that bubble. But what Claire has access to iMessage for like texting people for scheduling and different stuff. And so I don't want her to have bank statements. So I am, and this is, this is actually something that I was talking to someone else, a good friend of mine, and this is maybe a nub that I think is lost on a lot of folks about setting up an OpenClaw. Many folks have not maybe hired an employee before. And I'm not going to be like, you know, derisive or something, but basically like it's so similar to that. So I do think that because I have a background as an entrepreneur, I have hired employees. I just have that mindset on and let me describe it so that's not vague.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  The mindset is I just met this person. Okay. So whether it's a person on the street who I decide to hire, could they have like great interview? Or there's this new open clause, this is like a new entity in my life. Well, do you normally just say like, hey, new person? Here's like access to all my email. Here's this, here's that. Like you, you step, you step into trust based on them using information like the way you ask them to. And also you don't ask them to impersonate you. Usually the goal of an employee is not to impersonate you. So none of the open clause have full read, write access to my email or my stuff. They have their own stuff. One open clause has access to reading my emails, only read.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  They cannot send emails as me, but I have provision trust that they can read and like surface information to me.

• 22:36Claire Vo?

  It totally does because people were asking me, I had early on a pretty unique setup. And I was like, there's no way I'm giving direct access to my email. But you got an email from Polly. Polly has her own email address. And the reason why I knew how to do this really quickly is I set up my agent with its own email address. I delegated access to my calendar, for example, to that agent. I gave it a, its own one password vault and I put a couple key things in there that you can use. People are like, well, how did you know how to do this? I was like, I've had three EAs. I know how to onboard an EA. And you don't say, here's the password to my email address. That's just not how you do it. And then I like this idea of like progressive trust in your agents.

• 23:21Claire Vo?

  You know, you, you say most, you don't ask most employees to impersonate you. The first thing Polly did when I asked her to send one email was send it as me. And I, one, I sounded truly insane the way she sent it, sent the email. And I had to like follow up and be like, sorry, that's my sentient lobster. Um, but she's gotten better and you got the email where she's got like a little lobster emoji.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It's cute. And I knew what that meant. Yeah.

• 23:46Claire Vo?

  You know what it means. Um, and you were very polite in addressing her by name.

• 23:52Claire Vo?

  And I, I, I think this is very important.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's funny like, um, but that, that my philosophy on how to manage an open claw really does stem from management, management of employees, because actually I am polite, uh, because I'm like, I'm just going to treat them like an employee. So I, I, I think, you know, I, I don't want, I don't want to confuse people. I don't think that it's like, there's a human in that box and I'm going to offend them. Like, I don't actually think that. But what I do think is that because L L Ms have like grown up on the internet and with human content, they do under, they do know when someone's being rude or not. And so like, do I want them to know me as like someone who is professional direct? Or not? Like, I do think there's a relationship being built between human and bot.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  And so I don't think like it's going to jump out of the computer and kill me if I'm rude or something crazy. I just think that why would I be rude? The, the only difference is that I can rely on the fact that Sylvie, who helps with homeschool, like, that she's never having a bad day, that there's no day that her boyfriend dumped her, that there's no like, that I don't have to skirt around the issue. So I'm a little more direct and I obviously, I obviously I don't have to worry about giving her a task at 11 P M. I don't have to feel like, oh, I'm such a jerk boss. So these are all benefits, but I still fundamentally do treat it like an employee, um, employee relationship. Um, in order to kind of make sure that we have, um, like.

• 25:14Claire Vo?

  A healthy system.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:16Claire Vo?

  Exactly. Okay. So you have, we're just going to step back into it. And I know you don't personify your Mac minis, but I am going to send you like googly eyes and mustaches. And like a little bow for all of your, all your Mac minis after we're done here. Okay. So you have, um, your obsidian brain, you have fractured off agents, you've named them, you've put them in Slack. For people that want to use Slack as a gateway channel on Open Claw, you actually have to do some like app setup. As a Slack developer, thoughts and prayers.

• 25:50Claire Vo?

  And then you're doing lots of workflow stuff like organizing your logs, organizing your lessons, building creative for those lessons. I think this is super cool, but you're also Fin's coding, right?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So Fin is, uh, Fin is finance.

• 26:06Claire Vo?

  Oh, Fin is finance. Sorry.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Cole.

• 26:08Claire Vo?

  Cole. Cole is coding. I, I, now I get it.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  I, I'm just making this up, but I would just went off of like vibes when I was naming Cole is coding. Um, so this is the, now I can jump back into a bit of a demo. Cole is coding. And this was a big unlock for me. So as someone who, um, uh, has previously, I previously ran a startup where we've developed software, but I had never opened terminal as a human being until six months ago. I, I sold, I sold my company to a tech company without ever having opened terminal. So, and it's like, I'm almost embarrassed to be saying this, but I just want everyone to understand that I'm like, not actually secretly super technical, but that in this new era, I can like pop in, learn just a little bit more and do so much. So with that, um, let me share my screen.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, basically my new MO is like, if I can sync it, maybe I can build it, maybe. Um, and Cole is helping me with that new thesis. This is something called Mira. All this naming is random. Okay. I, I created this just for my family. This is not a real product. And by really, I mean, it's not out there like, but I, I decided to code something up for my family. The need came from probably something that's extremely relatable to other parents, which is I have kids, I, I don't, I'm not against content. I'm not against them ever watching TV or ever having any screen time, but I really want the quality to be high. Like they are, they're, they're, they're little. They're easily fooled. Like I feel bad on YouTube when they're watching a video that we put on that's like really, really nice and great, like camping or something.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  And then the next video that comes up or the next options of video are like AI slop with like AI cover art. And my kid thinks like, oh my gosh, it's a tree that's the size of, um, you know, a skyscraper. And I'm like, okay, there is no such tree. Like they're literally being fooled. It's, it's like, I don't know. It's, it makes me sad. So I wanted to make something. And so effectively, This is a product where it pulls from YouTube content and I can query these streams. So you can see like ones that Cole and I came up with together. And then I'm doing tests of custom ones, which is why you see this thing called test tube. But science, engineering, outdoor adventures. Now, here's what's key is I didn't actually create playlists of any content.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Cole has a prompt for going with a direction on YouTube and making like an endless stream of videos that will play one after another. And so my kids, this is my parental controls area, basically. My kids can open the app and the app looks so basic on their end. It's literally just a screen and they can just, all they can do is press go. And then it plays a video. And then if they don't like that video, all they can do is advance to the next video. And so they can like skip forward or go backwards and it maintains like their history. So they can actually go backwards if they love something and they want to see it again. And then it can pause and that's it. Okay, literally all they can do is go forward, backwards and pause. This is a nonsense for me.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  The other thing that I did that was like way beyond my technical capabilities, but Cole helped me through it. Is I wanted this on my real TV. And he said I could buy this thing called a Google TV streamer, which is a device from Google. And then we actually were able to send the app to the Google TV streamer device. And then there's a little remote. And so there's actually a separate app, like when I turn my TV on, I can select like Apple TV or I can select the mirror app, like literally and click into it. So my kids can't even get out of the app. Like once they're, once they're playing on TV, they have a remote that only controls this app. Anyway, my mind is blown, but I think the most mind blowing component is that I was just able to keep saying like, "Okay, but what if I want it on my TV?"

• 29:50Speaker 01

  And then Cole was like, "This app can't be on a TV." And I was like, "Try harder, Cole." "Okay, that's not an answer." "We didn't write it, Natalie." And so Cole is like, his whole personality is like the developer that could. I'm like, "No, it's not an acceptable answer." Like, "We are, we've got real work to do, guys." "Save these kids' souls, Cole."

• 30:07Claire Vo?

  And you gotta get me out of the AI slob.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, but you know, what's interesting is your claw bot can actually, if you really do, I'm only half joking, I really do talk to him in like these kind of extreme ways. Because just like a human employee, I think that if you imbue them with a bit of mission, they save that stuff to their soul, their kind of claw bot sold to IMD. And he actually feels like it's important, like, we gotta build this app for Jesse's kids, like this matters, you know? And we were able to get it across. When I first played and actually played videos that like were part of the theme I had suggested, my mind was blown. I was like, I can't believe that I, because this was over the course of like,

• 30:52Speaker 01

  maybe four days, like four days of like ping and call and being like, what about this, what about that? Until I had what I consider a usable app. My kids have watched this app in the evening for the like three or four nights so far, because I like started tinkering with it about 10 days ago.

• 31:08Claire Vo?

  Well, what I want to call out for people too is you have, I would say exponentially more children than I do. I have three and I have four, you have four, but every time you add one, it just like goes up, up into the right, as they say. And so you are a busy lady and you're probably not like, maybe you are like me, but you're not like me where I'm like just 17 terminals open at all time, nothing to do, but like vibe code, my kids are off at school. Like you've got children on the floor doing number blocks, which I just think is so rad. And so you're doing this probably like from your phone at night, like in these edges. And Cole, the developer who could, is always there for, to help you progress your way to it. How has that changed how you think about like getting work done, or when you do things, or how you interact with your computer even?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  It's a fundamental shift, like it's a fundamental shift. I, I used to, like if you met me two or three months ago, like basically just pre-claw, right? I would tell you that I had all these ambitions, like there's pre-claw and there's post-claw, that's all we have now. Um, I would, I should just reset the AD clock. Um, the, if you met me then, I would tell you that I had all these ideas and stuff, but I would, I would say some kind of like wistful thing about how like, I am homeschooling small children. I'm just gonna wait on this stuff, like to like, you know, you never get that eight, I would say some cheesy thing, like you never get the time to small kids up, like I'm gonna focus on that. But what, what, it's still true, like I really do want to be present with my small kids and we are homeschooling, which is like this crazy kind of adventure.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  And so I don't have very much time to sit on my laptop at all per day. But now I would say I actually can do it all. Like basically my, my oomph is back where I'm like, you know what? I can be present with my kids for like many hours per day. And I can be like off to the side doing some coding. Cole can go take 30 minutes and do a task for an hour. Or I can take 30 minutes and I can leave him alone for a couple of hours and just come back in my own leisure. And that's what's key about him not actually being a real person. Because it will be like, after all the kids are at bed at 9pm. We're like for one more hour, I do like a sprint with Cole. And I'm like, okay, but can we get this live or whatever? And he's like, he's like, oh, I need another API key. And we're like doing this work back and forth. Um, but I can squeeze it into those small moments.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  So now, honestly, it's like a crazy unlock. Because I feel as though I could be as ambitious as I kind of care to be. And I can be the parent of small children and feel present. That's, that's insane. I mean, it, it just feels like a whole new universe.

• 33:35Claire Vo?

  Well, and that, I mean, you're gonna make me cry because this really resonates with me. You know, I am like, what, seven and a half weeks postpartum? I've got the little bitty baby at home. And one of the things that I have appreciated is one, voice to, to typing, voice to text. A lady can breastfeed and code at the same time. And this is a miracle upon miracles. And two, I really value being present with my kids too. And I actually don't want to be sitting in front of a laptop all the time either. And so part of, part of what I'm sensing, I'm a little early in my poly adventure. I just got her to be able to do all the little things that I want her to do. Is I'm sensing it actually will allow me to walk away from my computer more.

• 34:18Claire Vo?

  Which is somebody who is very one with the tokens is quite healthy for me. Um, and, and get those things done. And you're right, I think parents run alternate schedules. I run like a five to seven and then a middle of the day. And then an evening schedule because we have to drop off the kids at school or pick them up or they have sports. And I do think, you know, people just don't appreciate how much it unlocks for folks that do have this ambition to really be there for their family and kids and also get all sorts of cool stuff done. And I feel the same like revolution in my, um, relationship with time.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  It's, it's so fundamental. And obviously this will scale, like we're talking about the parenting use case, but it applies to all humans. Which is like, if, like the more fundamental way I could put it is like if. Uh, an open claw is using my computer, then I can walk away from my computer. Because I can just, yeah, to your point, like make a voice note um, or something, and I can actually trust that there's things happening on my computer, which, which as a parent of a, of a little baby is especially important, because you actually literally can't use your hands sometimes. Which I think people are going to have a baby, like really have a lack, like lack of understanding of it. Like, I literally just can't use my hands. Like, my hands are the problem. Like, I can't use them because they're holding the baby. And if I let her go, her head is like all floppy. And like, she has a floppy head, okay?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  That's where we're at. Um, and so, so basically, that is really fundamental. But obviously, it benefits all of humanity if they can kind of still get big tasks done and big projects, but take a step back from their computer and like, touch grass, as we say, like, that helps everyone. Um, I wanted, okay, so if your game, I want to touch on another, like, what are open claw's limitations? And one of them is that it doesn't have a body, okay? So like, I'm going to say just, I'm really going to speak like

• 36:08Claire Vo?

  Hands are the problem.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  It also doesn't have hands. What it can do, it doesn't need hands to operate a computer. Like, think of it as like, it lives in a computer. And I'm not just explaining this to you, I'm just, anyone who's listening. Like, it lives in the computer, and so it can do anything that we want it to do on the computer. Open files, you know, edit files, send things, use websites, okay? But, do you know what it can't do? It can't like, clean my kid's room. It can't sort, um, my physical inventory and things like this. So, I can't, I can't like change that. I think that maybe we could have a whole conversation about, you know, humanoid robotics or something. But, for the near term, the best we have is open claw. And so what can we do to give it access or like, help, help us in the physical world? One of the things I struggle with the most, and this comes back to schooling,

• 36:53Speaker 01

  and I talk about homeschool, but I'd also, for anyone listening who's like, I don't homeschool my kids, anything that I do as like a crazy homeschool mom is applicable to all parents, because we all are teaching our kids all the time. So it's just, think of it as like, teaching kids and not just like, you have to homeschool. Okay, I, I'm sure all of us parents have invested in a bunch of stuff to like help our kids, like educational stuff. The biggest issue I have with all this stuff is like it just ends up sitting in cupboards and I don't know when to pull it out. And so what I did, because my, because I can't tell my open claw, "Hey, go and organize my cupboards and, you know, make an inventory." So I had to do the slightly tedious task of actually taking these photos.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And I took these photos of all the, like, things I consider to be educational that I own. And I have a bunch of stuff. And I asked Open Claw to make this inventory. Now, I'll, I'll pause so I'm not scrolling too fast. But basically, here goes crazy is, like, all I sent my open claw was the photo. All of the text you see, monosauri language materials, the type, age range, 3 to 5, description, wooden alphabet, tracing board. That's all Sylvie writing that. She just took the photo context only. I just want to be very clear, no voice notes, nothing else. All I told her is I want to make an inventory of my learning supplies. Here's the photos. And she wrote all of this.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  So not only is that insanely impressive, but then I asked her to relate the inventory that I own to the lesson plans that I have already in the system. And so she's like, she's like deciding like, "Oh, if you're doing this lesson plan, maybe you should pull out this material because it's related." So now we're getting to a galaxy brain moment, for me at least. Because I know if I, if I want to teach, like, one of my children, like, something, I can go to, I can tell Sylvie, "Hey, I'm interested in doing this lesson plan." Or, "Hey, I'm interested in doing the next lesson that would help Quinn write better physically." Sylvie can not only just like tell me, "Oh, here's a lesson idea." She can also say, "Also, you own that tracing board. Can you pull it out of the cupboard?"

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Like, now, I feel like she's actually really helping me with like my day-to-day life. Does that make sense? Because she's actually reaching kind of into my physical house and she knows what I own.

• 39:09Claire Vo?

  I love this and you just gave me so many ideas because I just hired a professional organizer right before the baby came to just like get my life in order. And you know, every now and then my husband's like, where are the batteries? Like, where did you ladies stash the batteries? And I'm like, I could just go take pictures of all my closets.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:30Claire Vo?

  And then we know we can ask Polly, or now I'm gonna like fracture off and get him. You've convinced, you've been a back many influencer, you got me.

• 39:40Claire Vo?

  And just be like, where, where are our batteries? Where do we keep waffle, waffle maker? Like, which cabinet is this stuff in? It's such a like genius idea to take these photos and just organize, organize, organize, and then apply it to the common problems in your life. And yours is, when do I use these toys? I'm also going to take pictures of my kid's toy room. And every time they say I'm bored, I'm gonna be like, you have 3,000 toys. Go play with this one.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and books, like so book inventory. So I've been taking pictures of like the book inventory and, um, and then, then I can more like, I, I can also say something very general, like, hey, Sylvie, Ford is like really kind of ramping into his like dinosaur era. Like, what do we, what do we have that I can pull out that's like already dinosaur oriented? And because, because I don't remember that I bought this book, like, you know, like, you know, it's like in a perfect world, we all have this like in our memory. But, but what's a bummer is for Ford at age four to go through a huge dinosaur era, me to like never pull out this book and then find it again when he's six and he could care less. Like, that, that's kind of the world I feel like I'm living in. I'm always like rediscovering something that I own at the wrong time.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  And so that, that basically, I feel like I could be done with that. Like now, you know, she can just tell me like, oh, four trillion of dinosaurs. You own seven different dinosaur things, like pull that all out, put it on his shelf. And, and so I still have to do it, but I don't have to do the thinking part. And I think that is really key. I am also doing this, this relates to, so Sylvie is the homeschool one. And that's kind of like where I'm going obsessive right now. Because some of the use cases are like so fun. Actually, before I move on, we have to talk about printing. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with this, but Sylvie can press print on my printer. Okay, my regular printer, all right? Like, I, I made a post about 3D printing and it kind of went viral. But that's why I want to say, I'm talking about my printer, just my regular printer, okay? Sylvie can press print on it.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And it's some, for some reason, it's a game changer. And, and back to like, everyone is gonna be like, what is wrong with this lady? Why can't she just like do Ctrl P? And I'm like, because I don't have hands, remember?

• 41:48Claire Vo?

  No.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  There's no hands.

• 41:49Claire Vo?

  No hands.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so, but I can be walking around with my phone. And Sylvie can generate a beautiful material or something. Or I can take a photo of something. I could get like, if I want to do a worksheet with my kids and it's like buried in a book, I could literally take a photo. And then just say, Sylvie, print this. And then boom, I have a worksheet to like give to the kid right then, like 30 seconds later. It's about the timeline, right? Like, it's like 30 seconds later, I'm holding it. Um, that blows my mind. So I'm trying to give her these like little moments to actually affect my real physical life. Because if the worksheet's stuck in the book and I don't want the kid to actually draw in the book, then I'm like, in my old world, I'd be like scanning and then uploading, emailing it to myself.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Then it's like, oh gee, drive says this file is too big. Like, it's like, I'm like losing my mind, you know? Um, whereas now I can just take a photo and be like, Sylvie, print this. That like friction or reduction of friction makes a big difference in like my day to day life.

• 42:48Claire Vo?

  And this is how I know we are doing a very parent oriented, parent oriented How AI. Because people always ask me why I have a printer. And I'm like, I've kissed, dude. We are printing non-stop in this family. Um, and you also gave me an idea. And I guess I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump into How AI lightning round questions because we're hitting the top of the hour.

• 43:12Claire Vo?

  Are the kids ever gonna get a, an agent?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, if I had to go yes or no fast lightning round, I would say yes. I know there's so many caveats and so, so I actually just won't bluster that much and like be like, but this and the answer is yes. But also, if you can grok my persona, you can understand that there's gonna be a lot of ways that I customize that.

• 43:32Claire Vo?

  Yeah. You've given me an idea. I think I want to, I want to buy one. I want to make my version of Sylvie. My kids are a little, my older kids are a little older and they're like really into math and really into sports math.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 43:45Claire Vo?

  And I'm like, imagine if they could go ask any question and print a worksheet or find one of the books that they've read.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  About batting averages or something like that. Like that's a game changer, you know?

• 43:58Claire Vo?

  Okay. And then they can also, then we can have our version of Sylvie remind them to practice their piano and do their homework in the morning.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 44:07Claire Vo?

  Okay. You answered my second question, which I usually ask, which is when you're frustrated with the agents, how do you talk to them? And I am also polite for the reasons that you'd say. But have you found any other tricks, any other pulled from the manager kind of pack tricks about working with this many agents? Or working with your agents one-on-one?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  The trick, I would say the deepest level trick I'm doing is the collaboration or like the, using Obsidian, like in conjunction with my agent. Because there's additional files of memory information that I have built into Obsidian that don't run natively from, that you just don't get with open claw. An example to make it clear is something that most people are doing that's like decisions. So I will speak, so I'm like a human, you're not trying to use magic words with a human, but I will sometimes say, each agent knows I have a decisions file of like final decisions that Jesse's made, like don't reverse back and ask her again about this.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And so I will like sometimes say a declarative and then I'll say, that's a decision. So I wouldn't like say it that way to a human because I would, that would be like a little weird, but I'll talk to my open claw in a way that is where I'm aware of their structure or if their persona, I feel like I want to change, I'll say, update your sole MD file. So, so obviously I wouldn't say that to a person. So I think. There's awareness that it's an agent and I can actually mold their identity more than I can a human and I'll talk to them about where to update themselves if I have a specific thing. That's the thing that's the most different that I do that would be different than my way.

• 45:48Claire Vo?

  I think this is a skill that people need to think about as they think about working with agents more and more is I call them these like incantations is most agents have like incantations of tools. And if you know the magic spell and it's usually like a keyword like decision in chat PRD. I'm like, if you say write or you say edit, you're going to get a very specific behavior out of your agent. And then what I like is you're taking it this next step and codifying those incantations into your system so that you know how to work with it. My last question lighting around is do you manually edit the soul? Do you go in and up open?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  I haven't, but again, I've got a hands problem. So I have asked it to send me sometimes I'm confused about why it's behaving in a certain way. I'm like, okay, send me your soul file. I'm like, let's look at this thing. So I have asked to see it directly because I'm like on my phone. I'm not even on the Mac mini or like whatever. I also had it backing up its files to obsidian those I actually could click in and see. Rarely do I ever click in and truly look. I ask, I ask it to diagnose itself more. I say, you're acting this way. Is this from your soul file? Can you make an edit and like have it? I go through like a suggested edits with it, but rarely am I actually going into it and editing myself. I always like, I basically always like it. I'm kind of polite. I'm like, you edit yourself like, you know, take your time, but also don't mess with us.

• 47:10Claire Vo?

  I love this. Okay. I got to recap top to bottom. We saw your obsidian second brain or brains. We saw your stack of Mac minis, your many, many claw, clawed bots, open claws, your claws. We talked about how you're using a lot of like photo to structure data, which I think is a really great workflow. We showed how you can use a coding agent to code something really bespoke and even get it on a TV. We talked about that no one has hands. So we all, agents and humans, moms alike at least, no, no hand problems. And then you talked about the killer use case of all this AGI, which is being able to print from a voice note. That's it. That's

• 47:54Claire Vo?

  all of it. Jesse, where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Um, that's sweet. You can find me Jesse Genet on X. Genet is G E N E T. And honestly, helpful is also other people trying this stuff, especially as it relates to any, any of these topics, kids, education, parenting, and sharing. I think a lot of people are maybe nervous to share. They feel like they're not important. If there's anything about my story and I was talking now, it's that you don't need to feel that way. I was like, no one was viewing me as some kind of like influencer in this space until I was just like, you guys, I'm printing on my printer. Like, so, so just really like, don't have fear about being embarrassed or something about sharing. The more you share, the smarter we all get, even if you're just running into roadblocks. That would just be my, that's

• 48:42Speaker 01

  almost my ask. It's not advice. It's like my ask, because the more you share, the more we're like, all going to get better at it faster.

• 48:48Claire Vo?

  That is the How I AI mission statement. So I love it. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 48:56Claire Vo?

  And I'll let you get back to your, to your claws.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Okay. Thank you so much.

• 49:00Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.