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

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 uses your files for you. And I was like, whoa, what is that? At first I thought, I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer. 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.

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 4 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. 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. Today we have Jessie Genet, who has 4 kids and 5 Open Claw Mac Minis sitting on her desk, helping her run everything from her homeschool to her finances. Jessie has established there are 2 phases now, before Claw and after Claw, and she's gonna show us the future of what an after Claw life looks like. Let's get to it.

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Attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Jesse, I am excited that you are 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, uh, in the claw space. And so I like that we got the 2 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?

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've actually been using this product called Obsidian for a while. This is how I even learned about it because I learned about it over a month ago now, which is ancient history in Claw land. But the reason is because I follow some people who are deep users of this second brain product called Obsidian, which is a collection of Markdown files, and we can get more into that. But 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 Claude bot, which it was called at the time, onto your Obsidian and actually having an agent who uses your files for you. 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 running into all these roadblocks of actually using it. because I don't have any time because I'm a mom. That was my discovery moment, was seeing this person say that. I was like, what does that mean? I went and looked up what ClaudeBot was, which is now called OpenCLAW. At first I thought, I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer, I don't know what I'm doing. But then I jumped in and I'm sure you had a bunch of snafus. I was reading your tweets about some of them and I had my own. But, but I, that, that was like my jump-in moment. Like, this is really interesting. I wanna figure this out and I wanna run my homeschool this way, so maybe this can help.

So you were running homes, your homeschool partially on Obsidian. Yeah. And you know, we've actually had a couple episodes on Obsidian. Teresa Torres did one on Obsidian and Claude Cloud, how she's running her own sort of 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. Do you want to show us what that brain looked like and then where OpenClaw layered on top?

Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain. But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain because I have 4 little kids. I didn't really have time to develop this second brain. We're in my Obsidian now and I call my vault— Obsidian is structured on vaults. I call my vault Family Learning. The reason I actually titled it that was that I want to track almost everything that's even vaguely educational about my kids' life, even if we go on a trip or something. I track more than just lessons in here, but we can get to that. But the core structure that I've been trying to get to that OpenClaw finally allows me to get to because it's actually doing the heavy lifting is I try to log all the little lessons and different things that I do with the kids. 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 out of the 4 of them were included in that lesson, what was taught, what might come next, notes that we have. And so here's my kids learning about the color wheel and 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 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. If the AI knows I did this cool pattern matching thing with number blocks, then it can suggest— now I'm just taking cute pictures of my kids. This is like a greed. Then it can suggest, that maybe it seems like Quinn nailed the pattern blocks, who's my oldest, but maybe Elle, who is like 2, clearly isn't quite there. It can actually track their progression over time and actually help me build curriculum off of that. We've got all these logs. We have curriculum sources also. For instance, I love the BFSU, like this specific science curriculum, and so I track that as a curriculum source. Then my OpenClaw, 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, here, once I realized the power of OpenClaw, I started taking photos of entire books and actually giving the entire book to my OpenClaw so they could help me build more detailed curriculum.

Can we take a pause?

Yes.

Let's go back to photos. Every parent loves this Teach Your Kid to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I have this book. It has gone through 2 children already.

Yes.

And part of the challenge of this book, this is gonna be very niche parenting content.

Yes. Very niche.

It's actually hard 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.

Yep.

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. Um, 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. Yeah.

Yeah. Delegate that. This is what we're, this is where we're at with OpenClassrooms. 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— 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 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, 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. I was thinking, what if I could extract that story from the book using OpenClaw and maybe make printouts of the story as a little booklet or something? Just ways to actually make this book come alive. But again, I have all these hopes and dreams, but I'm also actually homeschooling mom of 4, so I really need OpenClaw to do the heavy lifting, basically. I need it to do it. I can't actually do it.

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?

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 180 Lessons. 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, 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, the key concepts and vocabulary, the materials I need to do activities that 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 be like, okay, but I'm actually going to teach it tomorrow. Let's 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. I'll make this real. We just did yesterday this B-6, How Animals Move, Skeleton and Muscles. Last week we did this Adaptations and Survival about 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. I was like, okay, I want watercolor illustrations suitable for kids that can print on 8.5 by 11, of each of these concepts. By the way, here's the concepts. Here's my finger with a book page of these 9 concepts of what it takes for an animal to survive on its own in the wild. I'm just trying to make it real for people. This is how lo-fi I'm going. I just take a picture of a snippet of that book and then I ask it to use Naio Banana Pro. That's a Google Gemini AI product. 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. I'm going to 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 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 8.5 by 11 paper for each of these concepts. I just don't know. I just want everyone to sit with this for a moment. How basic is that? How basic is that? Now, the other real thing I want to share is that in this Sylvie, so I'm talking to Sylvie. I have 5 different OpenCLaws spun up because I am insane. We'll cover that more. But Sylvie is my homeschool-oriented OpenCLaw. I'm trying to make Sylvie from her, like the soul. There's this soul.md file. I'm trying to make her into the most magnificent teacher the world has ever seen. She's always really creative and really bubbly and has really— she's just really into kids learning because that's her personality. That's what I want her to be like. She's adding a layer from her soul MD file, I think, of how to make these images actually really stand out for children. It's a combo of 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 gonna be listening to this episode are gonna be, um, OpenCLAW pilled and have them set up and be working on Telegram or something super shady just to like talk to their AI.

Yeah.

And then some of them are gonna be really new to this concept because I think what you are 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. Totally. But you just said you have 5 agents. You sort of like glossed over that as if that's easy. How do you technically set that up in OpenClaw?

So I would say agents, Collaboration is one of the hardest things that I'm still hacking on. So just to be really blunt, and I will explain a couple foundational elements. So first, coming over back to Obsidian 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. I have someone, and by someone I mean an OpenCLAW, because sometimes I talk about them like they're literally human and I have actually confused people. They're like, wait, are these employees? Are these people? What is going on? Sylvie is the OpenCLAW where I focus on homeschool content, curriculum generation, logging. She only has access to this Family Learning Vault. I then have an agent, Finn West. I don't know why I'm just taking these names at random. 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 5 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.

If you just want to create an EA agent who helps you a little bit with homeschool and a little bit with this and that, that's not wrong or bad either. But I really wanted to go deep and actually make— it would be 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.

Yeah.

I'd be like, this is beneath Sylvie. She needs to focus on the children. That's part of why I have created multiple agents. Now, I am trying to work towards a path where my agents collaborate to make my life even more autonomous. It'd be really cool if Claire, who's my more EA-ish scheduling and my time management, ordering groceries and things like this, it'd be cool if Claire could talk to Sylvie effectively and help plan out maybe my— lessons for the week and tell Claire, tell Sylvia, 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, 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 5 agents, that there's 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.

Yeah.

Because all of these tools have been made for humans to use, and agents are hacking into them from the side. In order to even add my OpenCLAW to Slack, this is 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. I just want to be really blunt, that was really hard. That was harder than creating the OpenCLAW itself.

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?

So basically, here's my, 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 was sitting my laptop on. This is where I'm at. Okay. Like this, 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, um, is this necessary? No. And even financially, I wanna like address, I recognize I'm able to afford these Mac minis. 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. 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. 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, 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 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, uh, the open cloud doing scheduling. I don't want her to accidentally like send some information from a bank statement to the kid's piano teacher just because she's texting with her or something. That's why I have separate Mac Minis. Now, there are other ways to partition agents. This is my lazy way, just being perfectly frank. There's other ways to partition them, but I'm just trying to be overly cautious because there are security concerns with OpenCLAW, and I want to make sure that I have this actual physical environment for each one to live in for right now.

Yeah, I wanna 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.

Yeah.

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.

And Finn doesn't have any communication channel except Slack. He can't get out of that bubble. Yeah, but, but 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, I am, and this is, this is actually something that, um, 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 open clause. Many folks have not maybe hired an employee before, and I'm not trying to be derisive or something, but basically it's so similar to that. 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. The mindset is, I just met this person. Okay, so whether it's a person I just met on the street who I decide to hire because they have like great interview, or there's this new OpenQua, 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 step into trust based on them using information like the way you ask them to. And also you don't ask them to to impersonate you. Usually the goal of an employee is not to impersonate you. So none of the OpenClaws have full read/write access to my email or my stuff. They have their own stuff. One OpenClaw has access to reading my emails, only read. They cannot send emails as me, but I have provisioned trust that they can read and like surface information to me.

It totally does because people are 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, um, my agent with its own email address. I delegated access to my calendar, for example. Yeah. To that agent, I gave it a, its own 1Password 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 3 EAs.

Yeah.

I know how to onboard.

Yeah.

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. You know, you, you say most, mo— 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. So if you know—

and I knew what that meant. Yeah, yeah.

You know what it means. Um, and you were very polite in addressing her by name in your reply. I mean, I, I think this is very important.

Yeah, what's funny is 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. Because I'm just going to treat them like an employee. I think 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. I don't actually think that. But what I do think is that because LLMs have grown up on the internet and with human content, they do know when someone's being rude or not. Do I want them to know me as someone who is professional, direct, or not. I do think there's a relationship being built between human and bot. I don't think 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, that she's never having a bad day, that there's no day that her boyfriend dumped her, that I don't have to skirt around the issue. I'm a little more direct. And I obviously, I don't have to worry about giving her a task at 11:00 PM. 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-employer relationship in order to kind of make sure that we have like—

A healthy system. Yeah, yeah, 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 googly eyes and mustaches. And like a little bow for all of your, uh, 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 wanna use Slack as a gateway channel on OpenClaw. You actually have to do some like app setup as a Slack developer.

Mm-hmm.

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

Yeah. Okay, so Finn is, Finn is finance.

Oh, Finn is finance. Sorry.

Cole is coding. Cole is coding.

I, I, I, now I get it.

I, 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. This was a big unlock for me. 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 6 months ago. I sold my company to a tech company without ever having opened Terminal. I'm almost embarrassed to be saying this, but I just want everyone to understand that I'm not actually secretly super technical, but that in this new era, I can pop in, learn just a little bit more, and do so much. With that, let me share my screen. Basically, my new MO is like, if I can sync it, maybe I can build it, maybe. Cole is helping me with that new thesis. This is something called Mira. All this naming is random. I created this just for my family. This is not a real product. By real, I mean it's not out there, but 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. 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 a skyscraper. I'm like, okay, there is no such tree. They're literally being fooled. It makes me sad. I wanted to make something. Effectively, this is a product where it pulls from YouTube content and I can curate these streams. You can see 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 2. But science and engineering, outdoor adventures. Now here's what's key is I didn't actually create playlists of any content. 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. Um, 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 wanna see it again. And they can pause and that's it. Okay. Literally all they can do is go forward, backwards, and pause. 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. Because 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? Then Cole was like, this app can't be on a TV. I was like, try harder, Cole. That's not an answer. Cole is like, his whole personality is like the developer that could. I'm like, no is not an acceptable answer. We've got real work to do. We got to save these kids' souls, Cole.

You got to get me out of the AI slop.

Yeah. But what's interesting is your ClawBot can actually, if you really do, I'm only half joking, I really do talk to him in these 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 ClawBot soul.md. He actually feels like it's important. We got to build this app for Jesse's kids. This matters. We were able to get it across. When I pressed play and it actually played videos that 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 maybe 4 days, like 4 days of pinging Cole and being like, what about this? What about that? What I consider a usable app. My kids have watched this app in the evening for the like 3 or 4 nights so far because I like started tinkering with it about 10 days ago.

Well, what I wanna call out for people too is you have, I would say, exponentially more children than I do. I have 3 and I have 4, you have 4, but every time you add one, it just like goes up, up into the, the right, as they say. And so you are a busy lady and you're probably not like me. 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?

It's a fundamental shift. It's a fundamental shift. I used to— if you met me 2 or 3 months ago, basically just pre-Claw, I would tell you that I had all these ambitions. There's pre-Claw and there's post-Claw. That's all we have now. They should just reset the AD clock. If you met me then, I would tell you that I had all these ideas and stuff, but I would say some kind of wistful thing about how I am homeschooling small children. I'm just going to wait on this stuff. You never get the— I would say some cheesy thing like you never get the time that small kids are up. I'm going to focus on that. But it's still true. I really do want to be present with my small kids and we are homeschooling, which is like this crazy adventure. 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. Basically, my oomph is back where I'm like, You know what? I can be present with my kids for many hours per day, and I can be off to the side doing some coding. 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 of hours and just come back at my own leisure. That's what's key about him not actually being a real person. Because it will be like after all the kids are in bed at 9:00 PM, where for one more hour I do a sprint with Cole and I'm like, okay, but can we get this live or whatever? He's like, He's like, oh, I need another API key, and we're doing this work back and forth. But I can squeeze it into those small moments. Now, honestly, it's like a crazy unlock because I feel as though I could be as ambitious as I care to be, and I can be the parent of small children and feel present. That's insane. It feels like a whole other universe.

Well, and that, I mean, you're going to make me cry because this really resonates with me. I am like, what, 7.5 weeks postpartum? I've got the little bitty baby at home, and one of the things that I have appreciated is one, voice to typing, voice to text.

Yes, yes.

A lady can breastfeed and code at the same time, and this is a miracle upon miracles.

Yes.

And 2, I really value being present with my kids too, and I actually don't wanna be sitting in front of a laptop all the time either. And so 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.

Yeah.

Is I'm sensing it actually will allow me to walk away from my computer more, 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 5 to 7 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 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, like, revolution in my, um, relationship with time.

It's, 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 An OpenCLaw is using my computer, then I can walk away from my computer because I can just, yeah, to your point, make a voice note or something and I can actually trust that there's things happening on my computer, which as a parent of a little baby is especially important because you actually literally can't use your hands sometimes, which I think people who haven't had a baby really have a lack of understanding of. It's like, I literally just can't use my hands. My hands are the problem. I can't use them because they're holding the baby. If I let her go, her head is all floppy. She has a floppy head. That's where we're at. Basically, that is really fundamental. But obviously, it benefits all of humanity if they can still get big tasks done on big projects, but take a step back from their computer and touch grass, as we say. That helps everyone. With your game, I want to touch on another What are OpenCLAW's limitations? One of them is that it doesn't have a body. I'm going to say, I'm really going to speak very generally. Hands are the problem. It also doesn't have hands. What it can do, it doesn't need hands to operate a computer. Think of it as it lives in a computer. I'm not just explaining this to you, I'm just anyone who's listening. It lives in the computer and so it can do anything that we want it to do on the computer, open files, edit files, send things. use websites. But do you know what it can't do? It can't clean my kids' room. It can't sort my physical inventory and things like this. I can't change that. I think that maybe we could have a whole conversation about humanoid robotics or something. But for the near term, the best we have is OpenCLAW.

Yes.

What can we do to give it access or help us in the physical world? One of the things I struggle with the most, and this comes back to schooling, And I talk about homeschool, but I 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 be a homeschooler.

Okay.

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 I can't tell my OpenCLAW, hey, go and organize my cupboards and make an inventory. So I had to do this slightly tedious task of actually taking these photos. And I took these photos of all the things that I consider to be educational that I own. And I have a bunch of stuff. And I asked OpenCLAW to make this inventory. Now, I'll pause so I'm not scrolling too fast. But basically, here's what's crazy is like all I sent my OpenCLAW was the photo. All of the text you see, Montessori 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 wanna be very clear, no voice notes, nothing else. All I told her is I wanna make an inventory of my learning supplies. Here's the photos, and she wrote all of this. 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 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 wanna teach like one of my children like something I can go to, I can tell Sylvie, like, 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? Like, now I feel like she's actually really helping me with like my day-to-day life, if that makes sense, because she's actually reaching kind of into my Physical house and she knows what I own.

I love this. And you just gave me so many ideas cuz I just hired a professional organizer, 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.

Yes.

Yes. And then we know we can ask. Polly, or now I'm gonna like fracture off and get 'em. You've convinced, you've been a Mac mini influencer.

Yeah.

You got me. Um, and just be like, where, where are our batteries? Where do we keep the 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 kids' toy room and every time they say I'm bored.

Yeah.

I'm gonna be like, you have 3,000 toys, go play with this one.

Yeah. And books, like, so book inventory. So I've been taking pictures of like the book inventory and then I can more like, 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 have that I can pull out that's like already dinosaur oriented? And 'cause I don't remember, that I bought this book.

Yeah.

It's like in a perfect world, we all have this in our memory. But what's a bummer is for Ford at age 4 to go through a huge dinosaur era, me to never pull out this book, and then find it again when he's 6 and he could care less. That's kind of the world I feel like I'm living in. I'm always rediscovering something that I own at the wrong time. And so that basically, I feel like I could be done with that. She can just tell me like, oh, 4 Juliana dinosaurs, you own 7 different dinosaur things, pull that all out, put it on his shelf. I still have to do it, but I don't have to do the thinking part. I think that is really key. I am also doing this as it relates to— Sylvie is the homeschool one and that's where I'm going obsessive right now because some of the use cases are so fun. Actually, before I move on, we have to talk about printing.

Yes.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with this, but Sylvie can press print on my printer. My regular printer, all right? Like, I made a post about 3D printing and it kind of went viral, but that's why I wanna say I'm talking about my printer, just my regular printer, okay? So we can press print on it and it's some, for some reason it's a game changer. 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?

There's no hands in here.

No hands.

Yeah.

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. If I want to do a worksheet with my kids and it's buried in a book, I could literally take a photo and then just say, Sylvie, print this. Then boom, I have a worksheet to give to the kid right then, 30 seconds later. It's about the timeline. It's like 30 seconds later I'm holding it. That blows my mind. So I'm trying to give her these 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 scanning and then uploading, emailing it to myself. Then it's like, oh, G Drive says this file is too big. I'm losing my mind. 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.

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 have kids, dude. We are printing nonstop 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 'cause we're hitting the top of the hour. Are the kids ever going to get an agent?

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 be like, but this, and the answer is yes. But also, if you can grok my persona, you can understand that there's going to be a lot of ways that I customize that.

Yeah. You've given me an idea. I think I want to I wanna buy one. I wanna 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.

Amazing.

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.

A math worksheet about batting averages or something like that. Isn't that 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. And do their homework in the morning.

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 say. Um, 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?

The trick, um, I would say the deepest level trick I'm doing is the collaboration. or using Obsidian 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 OpenCLAW.

Yeah.

An example to make it clear is something that most people are doing that's like decisions. 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 final decisions that Jesse's made, like don't reverse back and ask her again about this. I will sometimes say a declarative and then I'll say, that's a decision. I wouldn't say it that way to a human because that would be a little weird, but I'll talk to my OpenCLAW 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 soul MD file. Obviously, I wouldn't say that to a person. I think there's awareness that it's an agent and I can actually mold their identity more than I can a human. 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 play.

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 incantations.

Mm-hmm.

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 ChatGPT, I'm like, if you say write or you say edit, you're gonna 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. Um, my last question, lightning round, is do you manually edit the soul? Do you go in and open the head?

I have been, um, but again, I've got a hands problem. So I have asked it to send me— sometimes when I'm confused about why it's behaving a certain way, 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 though, so 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 let, I basically always let it, I'm kind of polite. I'm like, you edit yourself. Like, you know, take your time, but also don't mess it up.

I love this. Okay, I gotta recap top to bottom. We saw your Obsidian second brain or brains. We saw your stack of Mac Minis. Your many, many Claude, Claude bots, OpenCLAWS, your CLAWS.

Yeah.

Um, 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. Yeah, that's it. That's all of it. Jesse, where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you?

Oh, that's sweet. Uh, I, I, you can find me, uh, 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 us talking now, it's that you don't need to feel that way. No one was viewing me as some influencer in this space until I was just like, you guys, I'm printing on my printer. Just really 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 almost my ask. It's not advice, it's like my ask. 'Cause the more you share, the more we're like all gonna get better at it faster.

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

Thank you.

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

Okay. Thank you so much.

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