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

0:00Jesse 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 like uses your files for you. And I was like, whoa, what is that? At first I thought like, I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. But then I jumped in. This is really interesting. I want to figure this out and I want to run my homeschool this way. So maybe this can help. You're trying to get all this stuff organized and you thought, man, if AI could do this for me, then I could actually get done what I wanted.

0:36Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain, right? But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain because I have four little kids. I didn't really have time to develop this second brain.

0:46Jesse Genet: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.

1:01Jesse Genet: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 Janae, who has four kids and five open claw Mac minis sitting on her desk, helping her run everything from her homeschool to her finances. Jessie has established there are two phases now, before claw and after claw, and she is going to show us the future of what an after claw life looks like. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Most marketing teams aren't short on ideas, but what they are short on is time. And that's exactly what Optimizely Opal gives you back.

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2:20Jesse Genet:Find out more at optimizely.com slash howiai. Attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray-Ban meta AI glasses. Jessie, I am excited that you're here because you are the open claw influencer. I didn't know that I needed in my timeline. I, you know, it's been very crypto bro adjacent energy in the claw sping. 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 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.

3:16I have been, I've actually been using this product called Obsidian for a while. So this is like my, like how I even learned about it because I learned about it like over a month ago now which is kind of like ancient history in like claw land right um but the reason is because I follow some people who are like deep users of this second brain product called obsidian which is like a collection of markdown files and we can get more into that but because I follow these obsidian influencers one of them like buried in a comment on a day where I was just scrolling was like game changer 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.

3:58And I was like, whoa, what is that? Because I've been trying to organize my homeschool in Obsidian, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the time to log properly all my stuff. And I'm like running into all these roadblocks of actually using it because I don't have any time because I'm a mom. So 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 Claudebot was um which is now called OpenClaw and I 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 and I'm sure you had a bunch of like snafus I was reading your tweets about some of them and I had my own but um but I that 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 so you were running homes your homeschool

4:50Jesse Genet:partially on obsidian yeah 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 um 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 so do you want to show us what that brain looked like and then wear kind of open claw layered on top? Okay, so Obsidian 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.

5:24So I didn't really have time to develop this second brain. 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 track almost everything that's even vaguely educational about my kids' life, even if we go on a trip or something. So 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 Open Claw 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.

6:03But 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 four of them were like included in that lesson. What was taught? What might come like next notes that we have? And so here's my kids like learning about the color wheel and like matching colors and stuff like that. And the vibe that I wanted was to be able to take photos of a lesson that I do and then basically upload them and have the actual open claw log the full lesson contents. And it's not just because I'm an obsessive record keeper, although maybe that accusation is fair.

6:42But it's also because I want to be able to use AI to plan curriculum. So if the AI knows I did this like, you know, cool pattern matching thing with number blocks, then it can suggest. Now I'm just taking a cute picture of my kids. This is like agreed. And then it can suggest that maybe it seems like Quinn nailed the pattern blocks with my oldest, but maybe Elle, 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, for instance, I love the BFSU, like this specific science curriculum.

7:22And so I track that as a curriculum source. and then my open claw again this used to be so manual for me I was like trying to type in chapters of the book and all this stuff but what I did is actually take photos of the entire book and maybe that's in my photos um yeah like you can okay yeah like here I actually um once I realized the power of open claw I started taking photos of entire books like uh and actually giving the entire book to my open claw so they could help me build more detailed curriculum so okay can we take a pause because let's go back to photos.

7:56Jesse Genet: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. 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. I always didn't feel confident about was I teaching it correctly? Was I saying those phonemes correctly? And it's such a brilliant idea to take a photo of all this and build even a lesson plan that just I could understand. So this is, I just want to pause and tell people this is such a great workflow to just take a book or reference material, take lots of photos of it.

8:44Jesse Genet:Maybe have your kids take photos of it. Yeah, you know, delegate that. This is where we're at with OpenFlow 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 letter forms for helping teacher kids like, have like a TH that is connected for teaching them the sound da, 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.

9:25There'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 I just feel like sometimes they find it hard to focus on like this like see me eat and they're like distracted by everything else on the page so I was thinking what if I could extract that like story um from the book using 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 basically like I need it to do it I can't actually do it okay so I interrupted you

10:13Jesse Genet: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'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.

10:44Then there's actually curriculum, um, which is like progressions of lessons I'm coming up with and lesson plans. So this, okay. So for instance, I have that curriculum source of the, um, 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 are suggested in the book. And then let's take it to another level.

11:21So this helps me because instead of just sitting down and reading the chapter, I can kind of cut to the chase and like be like, okay, but I'm actually going to teach it tomorrow. Let's like get this ready. And I actually can see the materials I need to pull out and all this stuff. and then what I'm really getting into that is very open claw related is actually asking my open claw to help me generate completely custom materials so I'll make this real we just did yesterday this b-6 how animals move skeleton and muscles and last week we did this adaptations and survival about how animal like what it takes for animals to survive let me go over to slack and you can see me interacting a little bit with my open claw I was like okay I want watercolor illustrations suitable for kids that can print on eight and a half by eleven of each of these concepts and by the way here's the concepts here's my finger like with a book page of like these nine concepts of what it takes for an animal to survive when it's owned in the wild and it's kind of trying to make it real for people like this is how lo-fi I'm going like I just take a picture of a snippet of that book and then I ask it to use Neo Banana Pro and I gave it um that's a Gemini a Google Gemini AI product um and so I had to give the API key for that specific image generation model to my open cloth but then it made these files look how gorgeous these are okay I'm only gonna like tear up but I think it's because I'm also postpartum um but I'm like look at how beautiful this owl is oh my god but but like okay I I just want to explain that my prompt was like make let me go back to it was just like make in watercolor style illustrations suitable for kids that can print and they didn't have by letting paper for each of these concepts okay like I just I just I just don't know I just want everyone to sit with this for a moment like how basic is that like how basic to that um now the other real thing I want to share is that in the um this Sylvie okay so I'm talking to Sylvie I have five different open claws spun out because I am insane okay we'll cover that more but um Sylvie is my homeschool oriented open claw I'm trying to like make Sylvie from her like the soul there's like this soul.md file I'm trying to make her into like the most magnificent teacher like the world has ever seen so she's like always really creative and like really bubbly and has like really, like she's just really into kids like learning, right?

13:42So because that's like her personality. That's what I want her to be like. And so she's adding a layer like from her soul MD file, I think of like how to make these images like actually really stand out for children. So it's a combo of like my basic prompt to her and her own like injection of like, okay, but we really need to make these concepts pop for the children, you know? Can I ask a question for you?

14:03Jesse Genet:Because I think, you know, some people that are going to be listening to this episode are going to be open claw pilled and have them set up and be working on Telegram or something super shady just to like talk to their AI. And then some of them are going to be really new to this concept, because I think what you're talking about is very accessible to parents, to students, to teachers, to actually anybody doing business is all these concepts of how can you log your day in a structured way? How can you take one piece of content and turn it into another piece of content? How can you create great visuals?

14:37Jesse Genet:Those are all applicable across a lot of use cases. But you just said you have five agents. You sort of like glossed over that as if that's easy. How do you technically set that up in OpenClaw? So I would say agents collaboration is one of the hardest things that I'm still hacking on. Um, so just to be really blunt and, and I will explain a couple foundational elements. So first coming over back to obsidian in this, in this, um, it's a, maybe a little hard to see that 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.

15:18Like I have someone, uh, and by someone, I mean an open clock, like, cause 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 it going on so Sylvie is the the open claw where I focus on homeschool content curriculum generation logging she only has access this family learning vault okay I then have uh an agent uh Finn West um I don't know I'm just taking these names at random okay um 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.

15:53He has access to his family office vault. So I'm kind of sharing a version of like provisioning agents. I have five because I want them to all have very separate personas with separate responsibilities. And that makes it worth it to me to have multiple agents. Okay. If you just want to create kind of an EA agent who helps you a little bit with homeschool and a little bit with that, with this and that, that's not wrong or bad either but I really wanted to go deep and actually make it would be kind of weird if Sylvie who's like my whole purpose in life is to teach kids beautiful information was like if I sent her my receipts I would almost feel like I'm being rude like I'd be like this is beneath Sylvie you know like she needs to focus on the children um so so that's part of why I have created multiple agents now I am trying to work towards a path where my agents collaborate to like make my life even more autonomous.

16:50Like it'd be really cool if Claire, who's my more like EA-ish like scheduling and like scheduling and my time management, ordering groceries and things like this. It'd be cool if Claire could like talk to Sylvie effectively and help plan out maybe my lessons for the week and like tell Sylvie, oh, she can't do that time because she has a doctor appointment. But this is a little bit, I'm not quite there. To be honest, I moved all my agents to Slack because Cole is working on dev projects. Anyway, 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.

17:32But to be perfectly frank, I believe now, after spending more than a week with five agents, that there 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 kind of like hacking into them from the side. Like 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 so i just want to be really blunt like that was really hard like that was harder than creating the open claw itself and so to create

18:20Jesse Genet:the open claw yourself are you asking open claw to create a new agent are you spinning up a new install or that how do you do that so basically pop here here's my team i just thought that i thought the room 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 situation like if you don't hear from me for a while um is this necessary no and even financially i want to like address i recognize i'm able to afford these mac minis already that's like a lot of money just generally speaking um i was not expecting this by the way okay you can you can run more than one open claw on a mac mini i'll even explain why do i have so many sitting on my desktop uh one reason is i'm trying to partition their worlds completely yeah um so for instance finn who's going to handle financial stuff again this maybe just makes you seem so insane but i run a i run a full quick book for 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 the open club's doing scheduling I don't want her to accidentally like send like some information from a bank statement to like the kid's piano teacher like just because she's texting with her or something so that's why i have separate mech now there are other ways to partition agents this is kind of my lazy way like just being perfectly frank like there's other ways to partition them but i'm just trying to be like overly cautious because there are security concerns with um with open claw and i want to make sure that i like have this actual like physical environment for each one to live in for right now yeah i want to call this out for folks that that maybe missed that which is the physical partitioning of different mac minis is great and then each instance is in a file system so you do have to think really carefully about what file system you're putting any of these agents in and then what i like about what you're doing is you're partitioning them by access both to data and to input output which is like that's very smart to say i'll give you access to all my bank accounts our 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 fuck he can't get out of that bubble yeah 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 a bank statement so i i am and this is this is actually something that I was talking to someone else, a good friend of mine, and this is maybe a nub that I think is lost on a lot of folks about setting up an open class.

21:27Many 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 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 this is like a new entity in my life well do you normally just say like hey new person here's like access all my email here's the here's that 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 to impersonate you.

22:16Usually the goal of an employee is not to impersonate you. So none of the open clause have full read write access to my email or my stuff. They have their own stuff. One open clause has access to reading my emails, only read. They cannot send emails as me, but I have provision trust that they can read and like surface information to me.

22:36Jesse Genet: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 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 an EA and you don't say, here's the password to my email address.

23:16Jesse Genet:That's just not how you do it. And then I like this idea of like progressive trust 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 I, one, I sounded truly insane the way she 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 what that meant yeah you know what it means um and you were very polite in addressing her by name if you're applying but i i think this is very important yeah what's funny like um but that that my philosophy on how to manage an open claw really does stem from management management of employees because actually i am polite because i'm like i'm just going to treat them like an employee so i i think you know i i don't want to 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 gonna offend them like i don't actually think that but what i do think is that because llms have like grown up on the internet and with human content they do understand they do know when someone's being rude or not and so like do i want them to know me as like someone who is professional direct or not like i do think there's a relationship being built between human and bot.

24:36And 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. So these are all benefits. But I still fundamentally do treat it like an employee, employee relationship in order to kind of make sure that we have like a healthy system.

25:15Yeah, exactly.

25:18Jesse Genet:Okay, so you have we're just going to step back into it. And I know you don't personify your Mac minis, but I am going to send you like Google eyes and mustaches and like a little bow for all of your Mac minis after we're done here. Okay, so you have 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 OpenClaw, you actually have to do some like app setup as a Slack developer, thoughts and prayers. And then you're doing lots of workflow stuff, like organizing your logs, organizing your lessons, building creative for those lessons.

25:59Jesse Genet:I think this is super cool, but you're also, Finn's coding, right? 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. and 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 I'm like not actually secretly super technical, but that in this new era, I can like pop in, learn just a little bit more and do so much so with that um let me share my screen i'm gonna basically my new mo is like if i can sync it maybe i can build it maybe um and cole is helping me with that new thesis this is something called mira i all this naming is random okay i i created this just for my family there's not a real product and by real i mean it's not out there like but i i I decided to code something up for my family.

27:18The 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, 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 cover art and my kid thinks like oh my gosh it's a tree that's the size of um you know a skyscraper and I'm like okay there is no such tree like they're literally being fooled it's it's like anyway it's it makes me sad so I wanted to make something and so effectively this is a product where it pulls from YouTube content and I can carry 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 two, but science engineering, outdoor adventures.

28:20Now, 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 want to 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 god sense 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 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 Once they're playing on TV, they have a remote that only controls this app.

29:42Anyway, 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? And then Cole was like, this app can't be on a TV. And I was like, try harder, Cole. Okay, that's not an answer. And so Cole is like, his whole personality is like the developer that could. I'm like, no, it's not an acceptable answer. Like, we've got real work to do. We've got to save these kids' souls, Cole. um and and you gotta get me out of the ai slot yeah and so but i but you know what's interesting is your claw bot can actually if you really do i'm 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 they save that stuff to their soul they're kind of claw bot sold imd and he actually feels like it's important like yeah we we gotta build this app for just these kids like this matters you know um and we were able to get it across when when i first 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 because this was over the course of like maybe four days like four days of like pinging coal and being like what about this what about that until i had what i consider They're a usable app.

30:59My kids have watched this app in the evening for the like three or four nights so far because I like started tinkering with it about 10 days ago.

31:08Jesse Genet:Well, what I want to call out for people too is you have, I would say exponentially more children than I do. I have three and I have four. You have four. But every time you add one, it just like goes up, up into the right, as they say. And so you are a busy lady and you're probably not like 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 VibeCode, 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 to help you progress your way to it.