Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:59:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:59:58] S0: And that's the heartbeat in action, right? It's just like every half hour it's just like, hmm, let's see what's going on. And then fires off some messages and then goes back to sleep. [01:00:05] S1: Yep. [01:00:06] S0: Okay. Any other examples that are worth showing or should we go a little deeper?
01:00:10 · Claire Vo
[01:00:10] S1: We can just again show... What I would say is it has helped me not just get my feet underneath me from a personal work perspective. It's also allowing me to take on new projects that I would've felt really overwhelmed to take on before. And so I am doing this Maven course for executives trying to transform their engineering product and design organizations. They've been asking me to do this for a long time. I'm like, "I'm too busy to do this." Finally, I was like, I actually think "I can pull this off because I have agentic support." So my co-course teacher, Zach and I have built the entire course in Claude Code, and then we recently built Sage the course bot now that we're about a month off from the course and Sage is project managing us to make sure that we are prepped for this course on time. So it knows when the course is launching. It knows that Zach and I are, believe it or not, very introverted engineers that don't want to market and don't really want to talk to humans. And so every Monday it's like, "Claire and Zach, have you remembered to post on LinkedIn about your course? Here's a nice little post for you to copy and paste so you don't have to think of something." And then whenever I do research or come across something maybe on the timeline that would be good for the course, I just paste it to Sage and I say, "I think this would be interesting for the course." She downloads it using the API, the Twitter API, puts it in our repo, takes notes, figures out where it needs to go into the syllabus. And again, it's like we would never be able to afford for this first version of a course hiring an ops person, or hiring a content manager, or hiring a software engineer. And we probably need it. We need somebody to project manage us. We need somebody to help us manage all the course content and the students. And so this has allowed me to spin up a business with a quote, unquote employee that will eventually maybe be big enough that we can hire other people, but to get it off the ground, it's been really efficient.
01:02:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:02:18] S0: What a time to be alive. [01:02:19] S1: What a time. [01:02:19] S0: What a time. This is crazy. Okay. So there's also just challenges that people run into with OpenClaw. A few I've run into is just using the browser is very unreliable. I wanted it to just add things to my DoorDash cart and it works and then it stops working. And then other people run into memory issues where it's like forgetting stuff. Some people just complain. It's just so much work just to keep it going. Let's talk about just the issues you run into and that people run into and any advice you might share. Maybe the browser stuff first, just like any advice for the browser.
01:02:52 · Claire Vo
[01:02:52] S1: Yeah. Again, going back to that gnarly feeling of product market fit is it has so many sharp edges. I won't sugarcoat it. It's a pain to set up. You got to feed and maintain your Claws. It is not hands-off, but the value is so high, I am willing to go through the pain. And I think any good product manager has felt this experience of launching a product and it's just hot garbage. It's buggy, it doesn't look great. And your biggest complaints from customers are not, "I don't think this is useful." It's that, "It's broken or doesn't work as good as I want." That's when you know you have product market fit. So I like the complaints of like, "It's buggy. It doesn't remember. I want it to do X, but it can't." That's not, not product market fit. That's a product that hasn't caught up to its product market fit. And so again, I think this is just a really interesting one for people who are our product thinkers. But going back to the actual problems I've experienced, I think you outlined them pretty well. One, I don't think anybody has really unlocked browser use. That is not just an OpenClaw thing. I think we look at ChatGPT Atlas, you look at Perplexity, Comet, you look at all of these kind of browser use. Claude has a browser use component. I don't think any of them are great. And the reason why they're not great is technically I think it's a complicated problem to solve, so I'm empathetic to that. And two, the open web has been so hardened against bots. And so the way websites are architected are actually anti-bot. And so there are all these hard walls where bots can't access sites. There are all these bot identifying mechanisms. For example, trying to browse X with a bot, there's like a lot of punishments being doled out when people are found out they're doing that. And so I just think the web is hostile to agents right now. And we're going to have to rethink what is the interface of the web to be more agent friendly because I think we skip ahead a couple years and the number one user of websites are going to be people's agents. And so we can either say not allowed, you're not allowed to use websites or think of a new way to open up the web. Practically what I have done is, you might laugh at this because we've been talking about it a lot. I read the docs.
01:05:19 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
There is a browser use documents page on OpenClaw and one, it explains to you how the browser works. So it uses a browser profile dedicated only to your OpenClaw that it can open up on its own and run very similar to if you have multiple kind of Gmail accounts and you're switching between Chrome profiles, exact same concept there. You just get one for your OpenClaw. [01:05:43] S0: And this is in Chrome.
01:05:43 · Claire Vo
[01:05:43] S1: And this is in Chrome. And you can tell your OpenClaw to give itself a color. So when you see the browser open, like pink is for Poly and green is for Sage, and you can really identify, especially if you have multiple agents, which one's working on which window. And then I know where browser use works and where it doesn't. So first thing you should try to do if you're trying to do something is look for an API. So does this have an API key? Your life is a lot easier. If DoorDash had an API, maybe they will have one, your life is a lot easier because then you can bypass the web stuff entirely. Then the second thing is, okay, if it doesn't have an API key, can it browse the website? And some things, and you'd be surprised which ones work and which ones don't. And I'll give a very specific example. I had Howie, the How I AI podcast producer open up YouTube Studio and look for comments that I should personally reply to. And so it was literally going into the comments tab, scrolling through, finding ones. It liked ones for me that I said that I liked and helped me find comments that I should reply to. And I couldn't get it through API. I couldn't do any... So I just gave it the browser. It was very slow, but it worked. But then I tried to have it do the same thing where I wanted to queue up some shorts in Instagram through Buffer, which is a social media platform. And the Buffer page was much simpler and it just couldn't figure it out. And so a lot of this is just trial and error. Will it work? Will it not? And if it can't solve a problem, I think where I've come and I would advise people to do is just walk away from expecting it to solve that problem and give it another problem to solve. So if you're saying it can't order DoorDash for me, maybe that's just not a problem for you, but can it meal plan for you? Yeah. Or you could say every day at 11 o'clock, I'm tempted to order DoorDash because I don't want to make myself lunch. So at 10:30, remind me of a few lunches that I really like to eat at home so I don't order DoorDash. So again, find out what the problem behind the problem is and see if OpenClaw can help you solve that.