Alex Cornell, Design Director on Meta's Muse, discusses how the team designed a consumer AI agent that prioritizes speed, progressive disclosure, and a messaging-like persona to make the experience intuitive and delightful. He shares practical use cases like shopping on Instagram, tracking golf performance, and reviving old blog posts, highlighting how Muse transforms scattered personal data into useful, engaging formats.
Summarized by Podsumo
Muse treats the agent like a person, using a messaging interface with a visible avatar, status updates, and progressive disclosure to show only relevant details—like a 'working' status first, then optional deep dives into the agent's actions.
Alex uses Muse for personal data resurrection: it recovered his 20-year-old blog via the Wayback Machine, compiled it into a PDF, and now delivers a daily podcast of random posts, making forgotten memories accessible and fun.
The app's generative UI is applied selectively—core primitives like chat and feed stay consistent, while dynamic ideas and status emojis personalize the experience based on user conversations, avoiding overwhelming changes.
Instagram integration is a standout feature: Muse analyzes saved posts to create organized folders, suggest gifts, and even generate a whimsical 'Sky Mall' catalog that updates daily with items from the user's saves.
Golf enthusiasts can connect Muse to shot-tracking devices and weekly score recaps, which visualize performance trends (e.g., bad front nine vs. good back nine) and suggest improvements, blending data with narrative.
"When your Muse is being obstinate, what is your prompting strategy? I am very polite... I have always been surprised with how like not consciously, but how I will just speak to it the way I would speak to like anybody else about it."
"I think one thing that I have found... is really wrapping your head around what a non-deterministic system is... you really kind of have to think more about the underlying foundation and the system, the architecture, the scaffolding that's in place."
"[Muse] is able to take [scattered personal data] and just like reform it into a way that's like really interesting and useful for me."