Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:14:19 · Claire Vo
[01:14:19] S1: I really like giving it email access. So I've had a lot of success using the Google Workspace ecosystem to have it communicate with me and communicate with the world. And so I say have an abundance mindset towards the email addresses that you give it access to. And again, treat it like an employee. So not only does Poly look at my calendar, draft some emails for me, coordinate my schedule, but when I had Howie, for example, my research assistant on the podcast, look at our analytics for YouTube, I had it just write a Google Doc and share it to me on its findings. Or I have it, every time we have a project document that opens, it goes in and reads it and puts in ideas that he thinks can make the document better. And so I do think there's this Gog tool that you will probably install during your OpenClaw install. It gives you kind of API access to Google Workspace. That has been very useful to me because again, I can just work with it like I would any other employee in Docs, in Sheets, in emails, and I find it very natural. The other tip that I would have is figure out a tasking system, not for you to the agent, but from the agent to you. So my task for the agent, they just keep this to do file with a bunch of checked off items. It's very loose. But sometimes we run into the limitations of the real world and I need to fax the doctor's office or I need to walk and do a return. Now, it could just remind me in text, but I'm probably going to forget that. And so I have my agent assign me Linear tickets for things that I need to do, not that it needs to do. And then that's in my project management system. I have tracker, we all agree on due dates. And so let your agent project manage your tasks as well.
01:16:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:16:24] S0: That is so funny. It's just like a sign of maybe where things go, where we are doing the bidding of the AI. [01:16:32] S1: I am just amped for the AI at this point. I'm just a vessel of Poly at this point. [01:16:39] S0: There's so many of the metaphors there. I think also, by the way, the reason it was called Clawdbot, I'm guessing is, like what makes this special is it gives hands to the AI versus just a chat where you talk, you can actually do stuff. That feels like a big unlock with this thing. [01:16:55] S1: Yeah. And behind it is a kind of coding harness named Pi. And so behind the scenes, it's something very similar to a Claude Code. It's something very similar to a Codex. It's a command line tool that writes and runs code and talks to you through an LLM. It just has some very interesting components to it that have changed the user experience to be, I think, much more delightful and much more customizable. [01:17:24] S0: Just like I think the fun of it is so important. I think people don't get just like you try it and it's actually fun. And you see all these people on social media talking about it, "I've never had more fun, even though I'm working harder than I've ever worked. I'm having so much fun." And I think products like this are part of the reason. It's just fun to use OpenClaw.
01:17:42 · Claire Vo
[01:17:42] S1: Yeah. And I'll give this tip to some of the big large language model providers out there and these broad consumer products like ChatGPT, like Claude is, I don't know if you've experienced this, you see, for example, working with ChatGPT and every new chat ends with, "If you want me to, I can tell you this mystery, like this next step." And you feel like you're being growth hacked into the next step, the next query, or Claude will say, "If I were you, the next steps would be bullet point one, two, and three." And it's sort of like this product experience that's very hardened to get you to engage with the chatbot. And my experience with OpenClaw is its closers are much nicer. Even if you look at that Howie example, he doesn't say, "If you want me to, I can write Al an email and make sure that you're prepped for this." He says, "This sounds like a fun podcast for you. Enjoy it. This sounds like a good one." When I'm talking, I was talking about getting the kids to a doctor's appointment recently and Finn said something like, "Hope oldest kid feels better." I was like, "I hope he feels better too. That's really nice." And you look at how it's prompted and it's just very human in how its identity has been crafted. And this is not magic. It's not a secret. It's literally in a file. You can go read it. But something about that system prompt is very effective at engagement without growth hacks, and that feels nice for somebody you're employing.
01:19:16 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:19:16] S0: If you think about it, I get exactly why this is the case because Claude, OpenAI, their business is trying to make money, they're looking at MAOs and DAOs and revenue. This is not, this is just a little thing running that's free. And so it makes sense why it wouldn't try to be convincing you to keep talking to it. [01:19:32] S1: Yeah. And in fact, I think Pete and the maintainers have been very clear about, this is open source, this is an experiment, this is not for everyone. This is yours to kind of grow and build and own and use and it's not perfect. And I do feel like that co-creation experience that we talked about at the beginning just engenders a very positive feeling when interacting with this product that doesn't feel commercialized yet and in fact just makes me feel like I can go commercialize a bunch of stuff. So very empowering experience. Good job, guys. [01:20:10] S0: Yeah. And I know Peter cares a lot about just mental health and people's actual lives. And I have a couple more notes of tips that you've shared that might be helpful for folks just to kind of close out. One is something called ramble mode. Talk about that.
01:20:24 · Claire Vo
[01:20:24] S1: Yeah. This is a Hilary Gridley special. So she told me this, which is so often when we're building software, we think about APIs and what API can talk to another API or is there a system tool that can do this or is there a no-code wiziwig editor that can work? And she told me about this hilarious thing called the Yappers API, which is the highest bandwidth API for an LLM is just chatting to it. It's just saying like, "I have Gmail and I have these folders that are really disorganized. And what I really want is to be able to come into my inbox every day and really know what's important." And what I really want is to be able to come into my inbox every day and really know what's important, get rid of the stuff that's not, tell every recruiter that sends a bad pitch to me to kick rocks. And can you do that for me? And it's not, is there a Google API for this or what should the label... It's literally rambling, and you don't even have to do that typing. You can do that in a voice note. And so I often tell people when they're onboarding to an OpenClaw, do it on your phone and do it in voice note. So when that OpenClaw asks you for the first time, "Who are you? What do you need?" Click the voice thing and say, "I'm Claire. I run ChatPRD. I also have this podcast called How I AI. I've got this complicated light." And just kind of ramble. And it actually makes sense of all that and can get you a really good outcome. It's very high bandwidth.
01:21:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:21:47] S0: And the voice note there is like in Telegram, you could just say do voice note into an actual audio file. It's not like transcribed to text? [01:21:55] S1: No, you do just an audio. You hold the thing down, and then it does, I think it does whisper transcription and then reads it. And then it can talk back to you in a very robotic voice if you want. [01:22:05] S0: Any other tips? Anything else that you think might be helpful for folks? Any other challenges you ran into that might be helpful?