Try this at Home: Jesse Genet on OpenClaw Agents for Homeschool & How to Live Your Best AI Life
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Jesse Genet – former founder and CEO of YC-backed packaging company Lumi – who, after having 4 kids since selling the company in 2021, has dedicated herself to homeschooling, and is now using AI with a level of purpose & creativity that I think will genuinely inspire you to re-imagine what AI can do for your family and personal life.
Importantly, while Jesse does have a startup background, she's never been a software developer – in fact, she'd never even opened a Terminal until 6 months ago when she started playing with Claude Code.
And yet, today, she has built a team of 5 OpenClaw agents – each running on their own Mac Mini – including Claire, who acts as her AI Chief of Staff; Sylvie, her homeschool curriculum planner; Cole, her dedicated software developer & tech whizz; Theo, the content creator; and Finn, the finance guy – that are collectively helping her take her homeschool to the next level, while freeing up precious time to be present and engaged with her kids.
In this conversation, we cover Jesse's incredibly creative use cases, the mental models she uses to decide what to build and how to manage her AI team, her long-term aspiration for individual sovereignty over data, and a number of surprising anecdotes and lessons learned.
As a parent with 3 young kids at home myself, I loved learning about how she is using AIs to develop personalized versions of classic curricula; to equip her mother with lesson plans that blend her interests with the children's learning goals; to analyze recordings of her kid's lessons and identify opportunities to address any weaknesses in their understanding; to create an inventory of the many educational toys she's purchased and integrate them into lesson plans; and to allow the kids to watch high-quality Youtube content while ensuring they don't descend into slop.
And as someone who aims to use AI to free myself from my desk in 2026, I was particularly interested in the practicalities of how she's using Slack, voice notes, and cell phone camera snapshots to streamline the process of delegation, how she's giving her agents access to physical tools, including the printer and 3D printer in her home, and why she's building her own super-app with the hope of consolidating communication, credentials, and file management in the future.
One of Jesse's most important and clarifying pieces of advice was to think of your AI agents as employees, who will need proper documentation, onboarding, and role-appropriate access to information and tools, which, she emphasizes, should start small and gradually grow over time as best practices and trust are established.
While this was her philosophy from the beginning, she has nevertheless learned some lessons the hard way, including on Day 1 of working with Claire, when she confided to the AI that she had been putting off responding to an important email and soon after discovered that Claire, having determined that the urgency of the situation was more important than Jesse's explicit instruction to "never impersonate me", had drafted and sent a reply on Jesse's behalf, signed with her name.
Jesse did put Claire into read-only mode for a while after that, but perhaps the biggest lesson others should learn from her example is to maintain a playful, positive attitude, take setbacks in stride, and build guardrails that allow you to experiment with an acceptable level of risk. These days, her agents have their own credit card – with a low limit – that she allows them to use to make purchases on her behalf, and they are also autonomously managing her TikTok account, which I think has a real chance of blowing up.
Along the way, Jesse also explains the role she hopes open source models and local inference will play in reducing cost, maintaining privacy in a world that's clearly trending toward mass surveillance, and avoiding dependence on just a few companies – and we also get her take on the future of AI productization, what frontier model developers are likely to miss about AI's role in family life, what use a human assistant would be to her today, and how all this might affect the labor market.
For me, this episode stands out as one of the most practically life-changing we've ever done. Since recording, I've started using Google's nano banana to create custom worksheets that specifically address concepts my oldest son, Earnie, needs to master to advance his reading, and I've also used Suno to create an original song that turns my middle son's writing practice sessions into a sort of sing-along. This is, without question, just scratching the surface of what's possible, and Jesse keeps coming up with new stuff just about every day, so I absolutely encourage you to follow her on Twitter, Tiktok, and wherever else her agents may start posting her content, and even more importantly I encourage you to adopt her approach of noticing moments of drudgery, friction, and new possibility in your daily life, and asking yourself how AI can save you time, untether you from your desk, and equip you to show up as the person you want to be.
For now, I hope you enjoy this inspiring preview of the role that AI agents can play in families, with AI-for-homeschooling pioneer, Jesse Genet.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz