Meta Muse: the AI agent people actually love
Alex Cornell, design director on Meta's Muse, breaks down the user experience choices behind designing a consumer-first AI agent. He discusses why consumer agents should resemble messaging platforms rather than developer tools, how a progressive disclosure status system reduces UI clutter, and practical ways to design for non-deterministic software.
- Meta designed its AI agent Muse by abandoning enterprise developer patterns like files, diffs, branches, and code threads in favor of familiar messaging conventions. Read →
- Alex Cornell, design director on Meta's Muse, argues that building consumer agents requires unlearning deterministic UI design where engineers and designers control every pixel. Read →
- Pure generative UI creates disorientation; Alex Cornell argues consumer agents require rigid structural primitives rather than unpredictable layouts that redraw every session. Read →
- Most consumer AI apps stream chain-of-thought text into chat interfaces as an uninspired patch for latency. Read →
- Alex Cornell connected an AI agent named Marlo to his Instagram account to sort thousands of forgotten bookmarks into custom categories, a personal golf manual, and a retro SkyMall catalog. Read →