Agent collaboration and communication limits

Jesse Genet is a homeschooling parent and entrepreneur who runs her household with five specialized OpenClaw agents. She layers them on top of her Obsidian “second brain,” deploys each on its own Mac Mini, and assigns every agent a distinct role—homeschool, finance, scheduling, development, and operations—so each one operates with clear scope and responsibility.

What you’ll learn:

1. How Jesse set up five OpenClaw agents, each with its own role, persona, SOUL.md file, and dedicated Mac Mini
2. The workflow for photographing an entire curriculum book and having an agent generate formatted, ready-to-teach lesson plans from the images
3. Using a coding agent to build a custom kids’ TV app from scratch and ship it to a real television in four days (with zero prior terminal experience)
4. Why Jesse treats agent onboarding like employee onboarding
5. The “decision file” trick and other incantations for managing agents that actually stick
6. Where multi-agent collaboration breaks down, and why no current messaging platform handles agent-to-agent handoffs well
7. How photographing every toy, book, and supply in the house lets the AI recommend real physical materials during lesson planning
8. The hands-free printing loop that took Jesse from scan → upload → email → print to “Sylvie, print this” in 30 seconds flat

—

Brought to you by:

Optimizely—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Meet Jesse and her “after Claw” life

(02:30) Layering OpenClaw on top of Obsidian

(04:44) Logging homeschool lessons automatically

(07:12) Turning books into a structured curriculum

(13:09) Using SOUL.md files to give each agent a personality

(14:39) Running multiple specialized AI agents

(16:43) Agent collaboration

(18:19) Partitioning data across Mac Minis

(27:00) Building a custom YouTube app with AI

(37:00) Creating a physical inventory from cupboard photos

(41:00) Printing from voice: reducing friction

(44:00) Managing agent memory and decision files

—

Tools referenced:

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/

• Obsidian: https://obsidian.md

• Slack: https://slack.com

• QuickBooks: https://quickbooks.intuit.com

• Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/

• Mac Mini: https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/

—

Other references:

• Claude Code for product managers: research, writing, context libraries, custom to-do system, and more | Teresa Torres: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/claude-code-for-product-managers

—

Where to find Jesse Genet:

X: https://x.com/jessegenet

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessegenet/

—

Where to find Claire Vo:

ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/

Website: https://clairevo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/

X: https://x.com/clairevo

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.