Coop

We've never been good at this part of family life.

Three kids. Two of them at different schools. Handouts in a language I'm still learning. Activities, drills, picture days, parent meetings, half-day schedules we don't see until the night before. By the time the day arrives, we're guessing.

We rush out the door. The uniform is missing. The indoor shoes are still in the laundry. There's a form that needed a stamp yesterday. My wife and I are not calendar people. We don't enjoy planning and we're not good at it. Add the language gap and three kids' worth of paper, and the system was always one missed handout from collapse.

A few weeks ago I caught Claire Vo talking about her use cases for OpenClaw. One of them was the household stuff, using it as a family assistant. I decided to try it this past weekend.

I named the agent Coop, after Cooper from Interstellar.

The setup is plain. A group text thread between my wife, me, and Coop. A shared calendar Coop can write to. When a handout comes home, one of us snaps a photo and sends it in. Coop parses the photo, adds the event, and sets a reminder. For anything we drive to, Coop factors in the drive and pings us fifteen minutes before it's time to leave.

A camera, a calendar, a chat thread. That's all of it.

If you want more stories on how I think through problems like this, check out my new book: The Problem-First Method.