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

[00:00] What brought you to the lobster agent we know and love? 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 onto 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 [00:30] 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. 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. People just don't appreciate how much it unlocked 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. [01:01] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. [01:09] Today we have Jessie Janae, who has four kids and five open claw Mac minis sitting on her desk [01:16] helping her run everything from her home school to her finances. [01:20] 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. [01:28] 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. 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

[01:58] platform for marketing and digital teams. [02:00] Plugging seamlessly into the tools you already use, handling the boring busywork, 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. [02:20] Find out more at Optimizely.com/HowIAI. Attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. [02:31] Jessie, I am excited that you're here because you are the open claw influencer. I didn't know that I needed in my timeline. I, you know, it's been very... [02:44] crypto bro adjacent energy in the in the claw spank and so i like that we got the two ladies of open claw basically here on the podcast and i think your use cases are so interesting and i love what you figured out so tell me [03:00] What brought you to the lobster agent we know and love? Why did you get started with this? - Well, 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. [03:16] I have been, I've actually been using this product called Obsidian [03:21] 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 Klaaland, right? But the reason is 'cause 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,

[03:49] Game changer is layering quad 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. [04:05] 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 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 Clawed Bot was, which is now called OpenClaw. [04:23] And I [04:25] 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. 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. [04:38] 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. [04:47] So you were running your homeschool partially on Obsidian. [04:52] And, you know, we've actually had a couple episodes on Obsidian. Teresa Torres did one on Obsidian and Claude Claude, how she's running her own [04:59] So like personal brain off of it. [05:01] 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? [05:14] Okay, so a psigiene has this cool opportunity of being your second brain, right? But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain, okay? Because I have four little kids, so I didn't really have time to develop this second brain.

[05:28] And so my so we're in my obsidian now. Okay, and I call my vault. Obsidian is structured on both. 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 kids life like even if we go on a trip. [05:45] or something. So I track more than just like lessons in here. [05:49] But we can get to that. But the core structure-- [05:52] 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. [05:58] is I try to log all the little lessons and different things I do with the kids. And so but I don't have time. [06:05] 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 the instructor, which children of mine out of the four of them were included in that lesson, what was taught, [06:16] What might come next? Notes that we have. [06:20] 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 upload them. [06:31] and have the actual OpenClaw log the full lesson contents. It's not just because I'm an obsessive record keeper, although maybe that accusation is fair, but it's also because I want to be able to use AI to plan curriculum. [06:46] 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 greed. Then it can suggest that maybe it seems like Quinn knows.

[07:00] nailed the pattern blocks, who is my oldest, but maybe L, who is like two, clearly isn't quite there. And they 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 sources also, like [07:17] For instance, I love the BFSU, like this specific science curriculum. And so I track that as a curriculum source. And then my open claw... [07:27] Again, this used to be so manual for me. I was 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. OK, yeah. Like here, I actually once I realized the power of Open Claw, I started taking photos of entire books, like in actually giving the entire book to my Open Claw so they could help me build more detailed curriculum. So OK, can we take a pause? Yes. Yes. Let's go back to photos. [07:56] 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. Yes, very niche. Actually hard. [08:11] to know if you're teaching this book well, even though they have this very dense upfront introduction about how you're supposed to teach it. Now, I always didn't feel confident about was I teaching it correctly? Was I saying those those? [08:24] phonemes correctly. And it's such a brilliant idea to take a photo of all this. [08:29] 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

[08:40] a book or reference material, take lots of photos of it. Maybe have your kids take photos of it. Yeah, you know, delegate that. This is where we're at with Open Claw is delegate everything. 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 Open Claw, 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 [09:10] in the sound duh for instance. [09:12] And so I'm actually thinking of 3D printing [09:14] all of the letter forms from this book so I can then actually like spell out letters and 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 or take the stories like my kids like these little stories in the book. [09:34] But if you notice, the story is kind of like buried [09:39] amongst all this other text. I just feel like sometimes they find it hard to focus on like, [09:43] 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 from the book using open claw 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 open claw to do the heavy lifting. This thing like I

[10:13] with Nish 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? So this is the layout that I've kind of created. So Curriculum Source is something like that book, like Teach Your Kids to Read in 1801. That's a source. And there's so many brilliant sources available to us as parents, right? [10:43] hide and [10:43] So that's a curriculum source. Then there's actually curriculum, 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 [11:06] off of each chapter of the book. Okay, so it gives me, it pulls into a lesson plan the actual objectives of that lesson, the key concepts and vocabulary, the materials I need to do activities that are suggested in the book. [11:19] And then let's take it to another level. So this helps me because instead of just sitting down and reading the chapter, [11:25] 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. [11:34] And then what I'm really getting into that is very open-claw related is actually [11:38] asking my open claw to help me generate completely custom materials. So I'll make this real.

[11:45] We just did yesterday this B-6 How Animals Move Skeleton and Muscles. [11:50] Last week we did this adaptations in survival about what it takes for animals to survive. [11:56] Let me go over to Slack, and you can see me interacting a little bit with my open claw. [12:00] I was like, "Okay, I want watercolor illustrations suitable for kids that can print on 8.5x11, [12:06] of each of these concepts. And by the way, here's the concepts. Here's my finger [12:10] 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. And this is how lo-fi I'm going. Like, I just take a picture of a snippet of that book. [12:22] And then I asked it to use Narrow Banana Pro and I gave it, that's a Gemini... [12:27] A Google Gemini AI product, and so I had to give the API key for that. [12:32] specific [12:33] image generation model to my open claw, [12:36] But then it made these files. Look how gorgeous these are. They're so beautiful. I'm going to like tear up, but I think it's because I'm also postpartum. But I'm like, look at how beautiful this owl is. Oh my God. But like, okay. Okay. [12:47] I just want to explain that my prompt... [12:51] was like make, let me go back to it, was just like make [12:55] In watercolor style illustrations suitable for kids that can print an 8.5 by 11 paper for each of these concepts, okay? [13:01] Like, [13:02] 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 Sylvie, okay, so I'm talking to Sylvie. I have five different open clause spun up because I...

[13:18] I'm insane. Okay, we'll cover that more. But, um, Sylvie is my homeschool oriented open claw. I'm trying to [13:25] like make Sylvie from her like the soul there's like this soul.md file I'm trying to make her into like [13:31] 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, [13:39] 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 [13:50] 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? 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 [14:08] open claw pilled and have them set up and be working on telegram or something super shady just to like talk to their AI. [14:15] And then some of them are going to be really new to this concept because I think what you're... [14:19] 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. [14:39] 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? [14:46] So I would say agents

[14:49] Collaboration. [14:50] is one of the hardest things that I'm still hacking on. So just to be really blunt, and I will explain a couple of foundational elements. So first, [15:02] Coming over back to Obsidian, [15:04] In this, in this, 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 [15:20] And by someone, I mean an open clock, like, because sometimes I talk about them like they're literally human and I have actually concedes people. They're like, wait, are these employees? Are these people? What is it going on? [15:28] So, Sylvie is the open claw where I focus on homeschool content, curriculum generation, logging, [15:35] She only has access to this family learning vault, okay? [15:40] 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. Okay. [15:53] He has access to his family office [15:56] What? [15:57] So I'm kind of sharing a version of like provisioning [16:00] agents [16:01] I have five [16:03] because I want them to all have very separate personas, [16:07] with separate responsibilities. [16:09] and that makes it worth it to me to have multiple agents okay um 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

[16:24] It would be kind of weird if Sylvie, who's like, "My whole purpose in life is to teach kids beautiful information," [16:30] 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. [16:43] Now, [16:44] 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... [16:52] if Claire, who's my more like EA-ish, like scheduling and like thing, like scheduling in my time management, ordering groceries and things like this, it'd be cool if Claire could like [17:03] talk to Sylvie effectively and help plan out maybe my [17:07] 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. [17:19] because Cole is working on dev projects. Anyway, [17:24] 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. [17:33] But to be perfectly frank, I believe now, after spending more than a week with five agents, that there is no one communication channel that is native to open claw. [17:44] meaning what you're talking about telegram um Slack iMessage signal [17:49] is actually very good for agent-to-agent collaboration. - Yeah. - 'Cause all of these tools have been made for humans to use, and agents are kind of like,

[17:56] hacking into them from the side. Like in order to even add my open claw to Slack, [18:02] This is one of the hardest components of my open clause setup for each agent was creating a custom Slack app to add the agent as a bot into my Slack. [18:12] So I just want to be really blunt, like that was really hard. That was harder than creating the open claw itself. And so to create the open claw yourself, are you asking open claw to create a new agent? Are you spinning up? [18:25] A new install. How do you do that? [18:29] Basically, here's my team. I just thought that I thought the like the turnaround. I have literally Mac mini boxes sitting on my desk. That's what I'm 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. [18:46] situation, like if you don't hear from me for a while, [18:49] Is this necessary? No. And even financially, I want to like address-- I recognize I'm able to afford these MacMoney's [18:56] Already that's like a lot of money just generally speaking. I was not expecting this by the way. Okay. You can run more than one OpenClaw on a Mac Mini. [19:08] I'll even explain why do I have so many sitting on my desktop. One reason is I'm trying to partition their worlds [19:15] Completely. Yeah. So for instance, Finn, who's going to handle financial stuff, [19:20] again this maybe just makes you seem so insane but i run a per i run a full quickbooks instance for our family's personal finance because i love that because i'm such a super geek so so that means every expense is categorized and all this stuff but that means there's a lot of sensitive information um i want finn to have like he's not going to get access to my bank accounts

[19:40] to like use but I'm gonna give him read only access to all bank statements all sorts of stuff so like a lot of information [19:46] I frankly don't want that information sitting on the same Mac Mini [19:50] As like Claire, who's the open club is doing the scheduling. I don't want her to accidentally like send... [19:56] like some information from a bank statement to like the kid's piano teacher like just because she's texting with her or something [20:03] So that's why I have separate mechanisms. 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. [20:12] But I'm just trying to be like overly cautious because there are security concerns with OpenClaw. And I want to make sure that I like have this actual like [20:20] physical environment for each one to live in for right now. [20:23] Yeah, I want to call this out for folks that maybe missed that, which is the physical partitioning of different Mac minis is great. [20:33] instance, [20:34] 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-- that's very smart to say, I'll give you access to all my bank accounts. [20:54] Or bank account statements. Highly risky. But you can't talk to anybody. So it's not going anywhere. 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...

[21:15] And this is actually something that I was talking to someone else [21:19] a good friend of mine, and [21:21] This is maybe a nub that I think is lost on a lot of folks about setting up an open class. [21:26] 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've hired employees. I just have that mindset on. And let me describe it so that's not vague. The mindset is. [21:47] I just met this person. Okay, so whether it's a person I just met on the street who I decided to hire because they have like great interview, or there's this new open qua, and this is like a new entity in my life. [21:57] Well, do you normally just say like, hey, new person, here's like access to all my email. Here's this, here's that. [22:04] like you you step you step into trust based on them using information like the way you ask them to um and also you don't um ask them to pers 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 claw [22:27] has access to reading my emails, only read. They cannot send emails as me, but I have provisioned trust that they can read and surface information to me. 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,

[22:52] 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 not do this? I was like, I've had three EAs. I know how to onboard. [23:11] an EA and you don't say here's the password [23:14] to my email address. That's just not how you do it. And then I like this idea of progressive trust. [23:20] In your agents, you know, 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 one, I sounded truly insane the way she sent the email. [23:35] And I had to like follow up and be like, sorry, that's my sentient lobster. But she's gotten better. And you got the email where she's got like a little lobster emoji. So if you know what that meant, you know what it means. [23:47] And you were very polite in addressing her by name. I think this is very important. Yeah. What's funny, like, but that that my philosophy on how to manage [23:59] an open claw really does stem from management of employees. Because actually, I am polite, because I'm like, I'm just going to treat them like an employee. So I think, you know, 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 [24:20] because llms 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

[24:31] or not like I do think there's a relationship being built [24:35] between human and bot. 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 only difference is that I can rely on the fact that Sylvie, who helps me 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 don't have to worry about giving her a task at 11pm. I don't have to feel like, oh, I'm such a jerk boss. [25:05] but I still fundamentally do treat it like an employee-employee relationship. [25:10] in order to kind of [25:12] Make sure that we have... [25:14] like a healthy system yeah yeah exactly okay so you have we're just gonna step back into it and i know you don't personify your mac minis but i am gonna send you like google the 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 [25:44] like app set up. [25:45] as a Slack developer, [25:47] thoughts and prayers. [25:50] 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 fence coding, right? Yeah.

[26:03] Yeah. Okay. So Finn is finance. Oh, Finn is finance. Sorry. Cole. Cole is coding. Now I get it. I'm just making this up, but I just went off of like vibes when I was naming. Cole is coding. So this is, now we can jump back into a bit of a demo. Cole is coding. [26:23] And... [26:23] This was a big unlock for me. So as someone who has previously, I previously ran a startup where we developed software, but I had never opened terminal as a human being until six months ago. I sold my company to a tech company without ever having opened terminal. So it's like I'm almost embarrassed to be saying this, but I just want everyone to understand that. [26:44] that I'm like not actually secretly super technical, [26:47] But that in this new era, I can like pop in, learn just a little bit more and do so much. So... [26:54] With that, let me share my screen. I'm going to basically my new MO is like if I can sync it, maybe I can build it. Maybe. [27:03] And Cole is helping me with that new thesis. This is something called Mira. I'll just name these random. Okay, I [27:11] I created this just for my family. This is not a real product. And by real, I mean it's not out there. But I decided to code something up for my family. [27:18] The need came from probably something that's extremely relatable to other parents, which is, I have kids, I don't, I'm not against content, I'm not against them ever watching TV or ever having any screen time. [27:29] But I really want the quality to be high. Like they are, they're little, they're easily full. 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. And then the next video that comes up or the next options of video are like AI slop with like AI

[27:48] cover art and my kid thinks like, "Oh my gosh, it's a tree that's the size of, you know, a skyscraper." And I'm like, "Okay, there is no such tree." Like, they're literally being fooled. It's like, anyway, it makes me sad. [28:01] So I wanted to make something, and so effectively, [28:05] This is a product where it pulls from YouTube content and I can curate 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. [28:17] science engineering, outdoor adventures, [28:20] Now, here's what's key is I didn't actually create playlists of any content. [28:23] Cole has a prompt for going [28:27] with a direction on YouTube and making like an endless stream of videos that will play one after another [28:34] And so my kids, this is my parental controls area. Basically, my kids can open the app, [28:39] 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. [28:45] and then it plays a video, [28:46] And then if they don't like that video, all they can do is advance to the next video. [28:51] 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. [28:59] and they compose [29:01] And that's it. Okay, literally all they can do is go forward, backwards and pause. [29:05] This is a godsend for me. 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.

[29:23] to the Google TV streamer device, and then there's a little remote. [29:26] There's actually a separate app, like when I turn my TV on, I can select like Apple TV or I can select, [29:33] 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 [29:46] is that [29:47] I was just able to keep saying like, okay, but what if I want to add my TV and Nicole was like, this app can't be on TV and I was like, try harder call okay that's not an answer right now like, like, um, and so Cole is like his whole personality is like the developer that could I'm like, no, is not an acceptable answer like we are we've got real work to do guys save these kids souls call. Um, and you got to get me out of the AI slop. [30:10] Yeah, and so, but you know, what's interesting is your claw block can actually [30:16] 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. They're kind of claw about sold IMD. And he actually feels like it's important. Like, we got to build this up for Jesse's kids like this matter, you know, um, [30:38] And we were able to get it across. When I press play 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, 'cause this was over the course of like, [30:52] maybe four days, like four days of like pinging coal and being like, what about this? What about that? Until I had

[30:57] what I consider a usable app. My kids have watched this app in the evening for the... [31:03] like three or four nights so far because I like started tinkering with it about 10 days ago. [31:08] 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. [31:16] goes up up into the 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 [31:36] probably like from your phone at night, like in these edges and Cole, the developer who could, [31:43] is always there to help you [31:44] 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? [31:52] It's a fundamental shift. It's a fundamental shift. [31:56] 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 the ambitions. Like there's pre-claw and there's post-claw. That's all we have now. Oh, they should just reset the AD clock. If you met me then... [32:13] I would tell you that I had all these ideas and stuff, but I would say some kind of like wistful thing about how like, [32:19] I am homeschooling small children. [32:21] I'm just going to wait on this stuff. Like, so like, you know, you never get that. I would say some cheesy thing. You never get the time. There's more kids that, but I'm going to focus on that.

[32:29] But 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. [32:36] And so I don't have very much time to sit on my laptop at all per day. [32:40] But now I would say, [32:42] I actually can do it all. Like basically 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. [32:55] Cole can go take 30 minutes and do a task for an hour, or he can take 30 minutes and I can leave him alone for a couple hours and just come back at my own leisure. And that's what's key about him not actually being a real person. [33:05] Because it will be like after all the kids are about at 9:00 PM, where like for one more hour I do like a sprint with Cole and I'm like, OK, 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. [33:18] But I can squeeze it into those small moments. So now, [33:22] Honestly, it's like a crazy unlock because I feel as though I could be as ambitious as I kind of care to be. [33:28] And I can be the parent of small children and feel present. That's insane. I mean, it just feels like a whole nother universe. Well, and that, I mean, you're going to make me cry because this really resonates with me. You know, I am like, what, seven and a half weeks postpartum? [33:41] I've got the little bitty baby at home. And one of the things that I... [33:45] have appreciated is one, [33:47] voice to typing, voice to text. [33:50] 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 what I'm sensing is...

[34:07] 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. [34:13] is I'm sensing it actually will allow me to walk away from my computer [34:17] Which is somebody who is very one with the tokens is quite healthy for me and and get those things done. And you're right. I think parents run alternate schedules. I run like a five to seven schedule. [34:31] 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 relationship with time. 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 are like – [35:00] The more fundamental way I could put it is if [35:03] 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 [35:11] or something and I can actually trust that there's things happening in my computer, which as a parent of a little baby is especially... [35:20] important because you actually literally can't use your hands sometimes. I think people who are going to have a baby, like really have a 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 a whole other baby. And if I let her go, her head is like all floppy. She has a floppy head. Okay, that's where we're at. And so, so basically, that is really fundamental. But obviously, it benefits all of humanity if they can kind of

[35:46] still get big tests on big projects, but take a step back from their computer and like touch grass, as we say, like that helps everyone. [35:53] Um, I wanted-- okay, so in your game, I want to touch on another [35:58] Like what are open clause limitations [36:01] And one of them, [36:03] is that it doesn't have a body, okay? So like, I'm gonna say just, I'm really gonna speak like very gently. Hands are the problem. 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. [36:18] 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... [36:27] Do you know what it can't do? It can't like clean my kid's room. It can't sort my physical inventory and things like this. [36:35] 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 mere term the best we have is open cloths. [36:43] And so what can we do to give it access or like help us in the physical world? One of the things I struggle with the most, and this comes back to schooling, [36:53] And I talk about homeschool, but I also, for anyone listening who's like, I don't homeschool my kids, [36:58] 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 be a homeschooler. [37:08] Okay, I, I'm sure all of his parents have invested in a bunch of stuff [37:13] 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.

[37:22] And so what I did, because I can't tell my open claw, "Hey, go and organize my cupboards and make an inventory." [37:30] So I had to do the slightly tedious task of actually taking these photos [37:34] And I took these photos of all the like things I consider to be educational that I own. I have a bunch of stuff. [37:41] and I asked OpenClaw to make his inventory. [37:43] Now, I'll pause here. I'm not scrolling too fast. But basically, [37:47] Here's what's crazy is, um... [37:49] Like, all I sent my open claw was the photo. [37:54] All of the text you see, Montessori language materials, the type, [37:58] age range, three to five, 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. [38:17] 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. [38:25] And so she's like, she's like deciding, oh, if you're doing this lesson plan, [38:30] Maybe you should pull out this material because it's related. [38:33] So now we're getting to a galaxy brain moment, for me at least, because I know if I want to teach one of my children... [38:40] like something [38:41] I can go to I can tell stuff like, hey, I mentioned doing this lesson plan or, hey, I mentioned like doing the next lesson that would help Quinn write better. [38:50] Physically, [38:51] 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?

[38:59] 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. [39:07] physical house and she knows what I own. [39:09] 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. [39:19] And [39:20] Every now and then, my husband's like, where are the batteries? Where did you ladies stash the batteries? And I'm like, I could just go take pictures of all my closets. Yes. Yes. [39:30] And then we know we can ask Polly or now I'm going to like fracture off and get him. You've convinced you've been a Mac mini influencer. You got me. [39:40] And just be like, where are our batteries? [39:42] Where do we keep the waffle maker? [39:45] Which cabinet is this stuff in? It's such a 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? [39:58] Toys. I'm also going to take pictures of my kids' toy room, and every time they say I'm bored... [40:03] I'm going to be like, you have [40:05] 3,000 toys. Go play with this one. Yeah, and books. So book inventories. So I've been taking pictures of the book inventory and... [40:14] And then I can more, like, I can also say something very general, like, "Hey, Sylvie, [40:20] Ford is like really kind of ramping into his like dinosaur era. [40:23] Like, what do we have that I can pull out that's like already dinosaur-oriented? Because I don't remember [40:29] 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 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's kind of the world I feel like I'm living in. I'm always like rediscovering something that I own

[40:51] at the wrong time, [40:52] And so that basically, I feel like I could be done with that. Like now, you know, she can just... [40:58] tell me like, oh, four trillion to dinosaurs. You own seven different dinosaur things. Like pull that all out, put it on his shelf. 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 as relates to, so Sylvie is the homeschool one, and that's kind of like where I'm going obsessive right now. [41:14] because some of the use cases are like so fun. Actually, before I move on, we have to talk about printing. [41:19] 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 made a post about 3D printing and it kind of went viral. [41:30] But that's what I want to say. I'm talking about my printer, just my regular printer, okay? [41:35] So we can press print on it, [41:37] And it's some, for some reason, it's a game changer. And back to like, everyone is going to be like, what is wrong with this lady? Why can't she just like do control P? And I'm like, because I don't have hands. Remember, there's no hands. No hands. Yeah. [41:50] So, but I can be walking around with my phone [41:54] 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. [42:03] I could literally take a photo [42:06] and then just say, "Sylvie, print this." [42:08] And then, boom, I have a worksheet to give to the kid right that much. 30 seconds later, it's about the timeline, right? It's like 30 seconds later, I'm holding it. [42:17] Um, [42:18] 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,

[42:28] Then I'm like, in my old world, I'd be like scanning and then uploading, emailing it to myself. Then it's like, oh, G Drive says this file is too big. Like, it's like, I'm like losing my mind, you know? Whereas now I can just take a photo and be like, Sylvie, print this. [42:43] that like friction or reduction of friction makes a big difference in like my day-to-day life. [42:48] And this is how I know we are doing a very parent-oriented how I AI, because people always ask me why I have a printer, and I'm like, I've kissed, dude. [42:57] We are printing. [42:58] non [42:59] stop in this family. And you also gave me an idea. And I guess I'm gonna I'm gonna jump into [43:07] How I lightning round questions because we're hitting the top of the hour. [43:11] *kiss* [43:12] Are the kids ever going to get a... [43:13] An agent. [43:15] I'm going to, if I had to go yes or no fast, lightning round, I would say yes. I know there's so many caveats. And so I actually just won't bluster that much and like be like, but this and the answer is yes. But also you can grok my persona. You can understand that there's going to be a lot of ways that I customize that. Yeah. [43:33] I 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. And I'm like, imagine if they could go ask any. [43:48] question and print a worksheet. [43:51] or find one of the books that they've read about batting averages or something like that you know like that's a game changer you know okay and then they can also then we can have our version of sylvie remind them to practice their piano yeah

[44:03] and do their homework in the morning. - Yes, yes, yes. - 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? [44:21] kind of pack tricks. [44:23] about working with this many agents or working with your agents one-on-one? [44:28] 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 [44:39] 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 that each agent knows I have a decisions file of like final decisions that Jesse's made. [45:09] back and ask her again about this. And so I will sometimes say a declarative and then I'll say, that's a decision. So I wouldn't say it that way to a human because that would be 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 it, I'll say, update your soul MD file. 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 do.

[45:39] A human. [45:40] 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 I'm playing. [45:48] 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. [46:14] into your system so that you know how to work with it. My last question lightning round is, do you manually edit? [46:22] the soul. [46:23] Do you go in and open? 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 so I'm like, okay, send me your soul file. I'm like, let's look at this thing. Um, 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 have it backing up its files to obsidian those I actually could click in and see. [46:47] Rarely do I ever click in and truly look. I ask [46:51] 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 go through like a suggested edits with it? [47:00] but rarely am I actually going into it and editing myself. I always like, I basically always like it [47:05] I'm kind of polite. I'm like, you and it yourself. Like, you know, take your time, but also don't mess with us. 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...

[47:20] Claude. [47:21] 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. [47:31] 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 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. [47:52] That's it. [47:53] That's all of it. Jesse, where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you? [47:57] That's sweet. You can find me at JesseJene on X. Jene is G-E-N-E-T. [48:04] And [48:05] Honestly, helpful is also other people trying this stuff, especially as it relates to 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 us talking now, it's that you don't need to feel that way. [48:22] 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 I would just be my that's almost my ask it's not advice it's like my ask because the more you share [48:45] the more we're like all going to get better at it faster. [48:48] That is the How I AI...

[48:51] mission statement. So I love it. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. And I'll let you get back to your claws. Okay, thank you so much. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. [49:07] 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.