Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:08:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:08:09] S0: I love that. That browser limitation might lead to me eating better and saving money. [01:08:15] S1: We can hope. [01:08:16] S0: You mentioned at one point Exa. Talk about just where that plugs in, which is basically like a headless browser thing. [01:08:22] S1: Yeah. So part of what your OpenClaw can do is access the web. It can do that through a browser, so it can open up Chrome and search and all that stuff. But as we said, the web is a little hostile. Or there are these web search APIs that are now available. Brave is, I think, the one that ships out of the box with OpenClaw. And think of them as programmatic Googles, which is instead of going to a website and searching in a search bar, it sends an API request and returns search results and websites for you. So Brave is the one that ships with OpenClaw. I use Exa just because I already have an Exa account. You use Perplexity. Again, it's just a way to give your OpenClaw access to the web when it doesn't have fingers and can't use a browser very well. [01:09:10] S0: One of the other limitations I've run into is it's not just that I couldn't use the browser, it's that it disconnects from Chrome a lot and it's just like, okay, I can't do anything. I know they've been shipping a lot of updates there, so I think that's actually getting better. And I think that's just like, if things aren't working now, they're just only going to get better because now- [01:09:10] S1: Oh, 100%.
01:09:10 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:09:10] S1: Oh, 100%. [01:09:25] S0: This project is resourced and yeah, people are working on it. Okay. What about the memory piece? A lot of people complain it's forgetting stuff. You mentioned that. Do you have any advice for hardening the memory or just treating it a different way?
01:09:37 · Claire Vo
[01:09:37] S1: I think less about hardening memory and more about, one, managing context. So when I start to think, wow, we've been talking about this thing for a long time, doing a check-in and saying, "Make sure to write all this to your memory in case it gets compacted or Make sure our to do list is updated with the latest," is a really good use case. And there's some hooks that you can call inside of OpenClaw to do that automatically. And I think about it, maybe again, going back to managing an employee. If you leave a meeting, somebody takes the action items. So if you're leaving a discussion about a topic, make sure you check in and say, "Do you have all the action items? Are the notes written down in a place that we can work on?" Again, it's just like this operational hygiene that goes a long way to making your OpenClaw efficient. And then the thing that I find it forgets the most that people don't think about enough is what tools it can use and how. And so I've heard a million times, "I can't read that email address." And I'm like, "Dude, you can definitely read that email address." And so there is a tools.md that lists all the tools it has access to and how you want it to use the tools. While I don't recommend people edit the soul by hand, it's sometimes really useful to edit the tools document by hand because there's just some nuances in how you might want it to read your calendar or search the web, or I use Linear as tasking kind of substrate for my agents, how you might want it to use Linear. And so the tools markdown file is a really useful one.
01:11:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:11:21] S0: So for the memory piece, you're not doing anything fancy. There's all these databases that are launching and okay. You're just using plain old memory and then- [01:11:28] S1: Here's a memory file with... [01:11:30] S0: Yeah. [01:11:30] S1: And what's so funny is, again, think about an EA. Man, I don't care what your system is as long as I don't forget things. You could have ugly Apple Notes, you could have the most beautiful Notion doc in the world. I don't care. It's none of my business. What is my business is that you get the job done right, and then I end up looking good. And so I just bring that same... I'm not a micromanager. I'm like a high bar manager. I have high expectations for outcomes and do not care how you get it done. So maybe that just translates into how I manage my OpenClaws. [01:12:05] S0: I love this. And it's just the metaphor of thinking about it from the perspective of an assistant that you hired. Are there other challenges you run into? Anything else that's just like, "Oh man, that was a huge problem." [01:12:15] S1: Yeah, there's a couple tips that I don't feel like people think about a lot. One is a Mac Mini does not have a screen. And I don't know how you manage your Mac Mini. If it's sitting on a desk and you plug in a monitor? [01:12:26] S0: Yeah, I plug in a different monitor and I have a dedicated keyboard and mouse for it. [01:12:29] S1: Okay. I'm going to change your life. [01:12:31] S0: Okay.
01:12:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:12:31] S0: Okay. [01:12:31] S1: Go into your Mac Mini settings and turn on screen sharing. So there's this mode called screen sharing mode. And then on your main laptop, if you are on the same WiFi, you can open up screen sharing and literally pull up the screen of your Mac Mini on your laptop. [01:12:50] S0: Whoa. [01:12:51] S1: Then you can update. [01:12:52] S0: You're going to save people so much money here. [01:12:53] S1: So much money. I'm plugging in things. We're running out of keyboards. I've got three of these. And actually that screen share that I showed where I was setting up another agent was not on this laptop. It was on the Mac Mini and I'm just screen shared into it. You don't need a monitor, you don't need a keyboard, you don't need anything. And then for the more technical folks out there, you can also turn in remote login, which allows you to get into the terminal of your Mac Mini on the same WiFi. So those, that has been life changing for me because I had Mac Minis in a monitor on my kitchen table for a really long time. [01:13:29] S0: Okay. Two questions. Do you need a monitor and keyboard, mouse to get it going or can you start that screen share somehow magically from the beginning? [01:13:37] S1: No, I would recommend a monitor, keyboard, mouse to get it going because you have to turn on the setting somehow.