How I AI - How Meta designed Muse: an AI agent people actually want to talk to | Alex Cornell (Design Director)

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Alex Cornell is a design director at Meta, where he leads design on Muse, Meta’s consumer AI agent. He came to the role with a long background in software product design, including time as a founder, and has spent the past year building one of the most thoughtful agent interfaces in the consumer AI space. Muse ships with a custom avatar, a three-layer status display, a personalized ideas surface, and a generative feed. Alex has been sharing the reasoning behind each of those design decisions publicly on Threads.What you’ll learn:Why Alex built Muse to feel like messaging, not an AI appHow Muse’s three-layer status system accommodates different levels of technical expertiseWhat generative UI actually means in a shipped consumer productHow Alex turned years of forgotten Instagram saves into a daily shopping catalogWhy his mom apologized to her Muse, and what it means for AI designHow he uses Muse to track his golf game, shot by shot, as he works toward a single-digit handicapThe mindset shift designers need when the output is never pixel-perfectWhen to use the main chat versus a side chat, and where the architecture still falls short—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Welcome and guest intro(02:50) Designing Muse(05:33) Choosing which primitives to surface: characters, ideas, feed(08:50) Speed of model and response times(11:01) Generative UI and personalization(14:25) SkyMall demo: Instagram saves turned into a shopping catalog(17:16) Shopping, monitoring, and price alerts with Muse(19:07) Instagram and Pinterest connectors for visual data(21:40) Golf use case: round recaps, shot data, practice breakdowns(25:28) Main chat versus side chats(27:56) Old blog turned morning podcast: 20 years of posts via the Wayback Machine(29:39) Chess dashboard: game analysis with a snarky coach(30:59) What designers need to learn for AI, and what still works(34:33) Prompting strategy when Muse is being obstinate(36:31) Where to find Alex—Tools referenced:• Meta Muse: https://muse.ai—Other references:• The Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com• Chess.com: https://www.chess.com• SkyMall/Sharper Image aesthetic: https://www.skymall.com—Where to find Alex Cornell:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-cornell-5449a99X: https://x.com/alexcornell—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].

designers have struggled with how much do we narrate along the way what is happening so it's quite obvious to the user so that latency doesn't feel so painful my experience in the muse app is i do like that progressive disclosure and it's one of the things i called out in our review but also it's just fast like it is just fast if you are a engineer you may want to know exactly what your agent has done and you can find that in muse but if you're a normal person you maybe just want to know like is it doing something so at the top it'll tell you it's working I'm very happy with our solution currently because we've sort of like exposed the benefit of the main chat to people but I feel like there's a lot more that we could do in terms of helping people organize I had a blog 20 years ago and I had

marlow go and find it and then accumulated them into one PDF first but the way that I like to read it now just again from memory is via a podcast and muse is able to take it and just like re form it into a way that's like really interesting and useful for me. When your muse is being obstinate, what is your prompting strategy? What do you do? Welcome back to How IAI. I'm Clarevoh, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Alex Cornell, design director on meta's muse, and he's here to talk a little bit about how to design a great agent experience for consumers and a little bit more about some meta-muse use cases you might not have thought of, especially ones that involve shopping on Instagram and going really hard

into some of your personal hobbies. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your co-pilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one.

To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where Work OS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for Enterprise features. OpenAI, perplexity, and cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at WorkOS.com.

Start building today. Alex, welcome to HowIAI. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Big fan. Happy to be here. I am, I was just saying, I am a big, big fan of Muse. And I have used probably every AI agent on the planet. And Muse, I will tell you, fastest time to pure delight I have had with an AI product in a very, very long time.

So tell us a little bit about how you approached designing this agent. because I think some of the primitives you picked are very different than what we see in other agents. It seems like the persona that you're going after is different. Walk me through how you all ended up where you ended up from a design perspective. Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that. It was definitely a really interesting challenge and I felt like a unique one. I think we all could feel that something was different this time around, I think, from a capability perspective.

And I think like just simple things like the fact that an age. agent can message you proactively. Changes the nature of like how you think about the product from a design perspective, even in like super simple ways. Like I've joked before because we have bubbles around our messages, you know, and like that's typically something that you associate more with messaging than like an AI app. Like long ago, I think most AI apps kind of strip those out. And that is there, among other reasons, to like help with the like separation that you need when like an agent is possibly messaging you at different times of the day. You kind of need to know like where and when the different messages begin. And so like simple things like that, I think, inform some of the design.

But the basic framing that always we went back to and I think was probably the most helpful was just imagining that this interface was more of an exchange between you and an entity. And that's why it's embodied at the top of the screen. And so a lot of the patterns that we looked at were much more messaging patterns, you know, and not thinking about how did this work before in different AI apps or using kind of like the traditional industry, I guess, as a reference. It was more like, how would you handle this if you were actually speaking with another person, you know, and that was immensely clarifying, I think, in almost every decision that we had to make. And I think defines kind of how it feels.

You know, when you look at it, it feels like a messaging app. you see a little guy there at the top of the screen. And I think like that, even something like that, you know, one of the other capabilities of it being able to work in the background makes it really important that you know when it's working. And so like just simply having that status, I think, has been one of the most important decisions that we made. The other thing that strikes me as very different about Muse is the primitives that you've

chosen to elevate as core parts of the application. Because I think for those of us who have. have been using AI, building tools, chatbots, etc. We're used to these ideas of like threads and chats and projects and machines and files and diffs like and connectors. Like they're these very software centric concepts. I think because a lot of these agents have primarily been built as coding agents for the enterprise or knowledge work agents. And then I look at muse and what really struck me is you have this like character first of all as a primary entity. You have chats.

You have ideas. You know, you have these, you have your feed. Like you've just chosen different aspects to elevate. Is that because you knew that this was going to be serving a different type of user with a different kind of like breadth of intention around what this agent could get done for them? Yeah. You know, I got a text actually for my mom like this morning, which is really funny. She said that she has apologized to her muse for making him work so hard and thanked him for all that he's done for her,

which I found really gratifying because I have been working in software for a long time, and I don't think my mom has ever used a thing that I've made, not because, like, I don't make interesting things. It's just like, to your point, I think typically they can be maybe a little bit inaccessible to kind of the average person. And I think with this kind of technology, too, it is so new and has so much capability to it that's not obvious. I think, like, that was definitely a huge part of what we were after in terms of making this more accessible and intuitive for people to use. And I think, like, I mean, you hear a lot about progressive disclosure and design, and it's kind of one of those things that, like, you hear, like, on day one and then, like, you always think about. but like, I don't know, you don't use it every day. But in this product, I found it to be one of the most helpful things, which is like,

if you take something like status, it's like if you are a engineer, you may want to know exactly what your agent has done. And you can find that in Muse. But if you're a normal person, you maybe just want to know, like, is it doing something? So at the top, it'll tell you it's working. JollyVa is working. And then your next question might be, what's it working on? And so it will tell you that with the little emoji, like researching pumpkin.

patches. But then if you want to go a little bit further, you tap on it. And then you have a list of everything that's done. If you want to go a little bit further, you could tap on that. And then eventually you get down to where you're going to see the curl and all the, like, all the code and everything, which is really important from like an auditing perspective. But it's only there if you need it. And it doesn't get in the way for people who may not know what that means. And I think like you see like a lot of what is traditionally referred to as chain of thought can get pretty loud. And like really detailed in the core chat. And that's the kind of thing I think that like,

typically we would have just put that in there because that's like what you do these days in AI apps. But I think in this case it was like, well, does it really need to be there for everybody? It's like probably not, you know. I'll give you one other compliment because again, I am a, I'm a muse girl now. But I also think that a lot of times these chain of thought reasoning user, you know, like elements in the UI are there as a bandaid for latency. which is it feels very frustrating as a user to sit and wonder,

is my agent working on something? And is it making progress or is it just stuck? And so I think a lot of designers have struggled with how much do we narrate along the way, what is happening. So it's quite obvious to the user. So that latency doesn't feel so painful versus how much do we kind of like do progressive disclosure. And what I think is nice about my experience in the Muse app is I do like that progressive disclosure and is one of the things I called out in our review that I thought was quite nice,

but also it's just fast. It is just fast. The model is just fast. I do think for especially something that's going to try to catch the eye of consumers, that latency really matters. And it's a zippy little agent. Yeah, it is. And it's really, you know, it's interesting actually because it's one of those things where sometimes it's so fast that you are tempted to think, like, is it, like, did it actually go do a thing? Like, because it's so quick. And I think, like, the nice thing is there are times where it will, you'll ask for something somewhat complex, and it will at least acknowledge your request, you know, either through a reaction or an initial message and then go off and do the hard work. And I think, like, like a person, you know, if you ask for something hard, they're not going to just ghost you until they're done.

They'll usually just say, like, okay, here's the plan. I'm going to do this. I'll be back when I have it done. or even just a reaction is enough to let you know that it's doing it. And so I think like that balance of when to respond quickly, how to respond, what to say, and then like what to do in the meantime if it is a really long task. And that's where we start to rely a little bit on that status display

to let you know, like, what's going on. And if you want to know, like, specifically did it get stuck or is it like going down the wrong path? You can check. And I think that that's really helpful because you never really feel like it's just gone off and left you a line. Yeah, one other thing, just thinking about this status message I want to talk about, which is this concept of generative UI. And I think a lot of people think, and they're thinking about generative UI, they think like every time I log into my dashboard, it's different.

Or every button I click is unique for every person. And what I saw in looking at the muse agent is you're using generative UI in a really elegant way, which is like the core primitives stick. You've got your avatar, you've got your status message, you've got your ideas, you've got your feed. But then within that, every time I log in, I have a new set of ideas that are based on the things that we've talked about. And every time the status is generated, it picks the exact right emoji. And when it's working on its computer, you get a little generated video of it typing on its laptop. Like that type of, quote unquote, generative UI, I think is really delightful. and much easier to understand for folks trying to understand how they could bring these concepts into their own app,

then like every time any one person opens up, the UI is completely different. Right. Yeah, I think perhaps one day we'll get there. But I think these days, it's definitely a little bit more on the rails in terms of like where we can apply it. The avatar is a great example. And I think people find a lot of delight I have seen when they do make their own new avatar, seeing that it will then be translated into each one of those states, you know, typing on that's a little computer. or making something. And that's been one of the most fun things because we of course have our mascot. And, you know, Jolly has the state's as well. But like if you turn yours into a tomato,

then you'll see a tomato typing on the computer. And that really does feel very personal. And this, I think, a very delightful thing. But yeah, you mentioned feed and ideas. And I think that those surfaces, you know, you could very, you could definitely imagine this app with just chat. And I think part of an agent's power is that it can handle a lot in a single chat and you can kind of just treat it like a really capable personal assistant in that way. I think though, like there's so much that it can do that might not be intuitive for people that exposing some of those additional capabilities just with the additional surfaces that we have like ideas in particular, it's serving a very specific purpose, which is basically just telling you some things that you may not know that it can do. I think, like, to your point, if those were just generic suggestions, that would be one thing, maybe even useful things. But when they're specifically based on what you've talked about, I think that's when people really find the power where, like, if you talk to it about golf all day,

like I do, like, then I got a lot of golf ideas. And then the feed, too, the feeds a fun one because you can experiment. And I think people should experiment more than they do. It's like you can write anything you want in the prompt and get a feed of whatever. Like, I mix, match things all the time and like have a really uh really interesting feed and i often change mine too just because like sometimes i'll get tired of getting like muse news or something and i'll switch it to something else like i try to do like kid stuff on the weekend for example but yeah i mean it's still a native surface though you know like the feed unit that you're looking at is still like one that we've designed and it's being powered by the intelligence of like and the personalization that your muse has

but it's like it's not yet like a fully generative surface. Okay. So speaking of ideas or things that your muse can do for you that you wouldn't thought of, I'm going to let you get your screen up and share with us some of your ideas. And while you're doing that, I will tell you what my muse's name is, which it's slime. And slime is the pink dinosaur fashioned after my child's favorite, favorite stuffy. And he is very adorable. Okay, so let's look at Mario.

Yeah, so mine is Marlowe, which is a cactus. And I have a bit of a complex relationship with Marlowe because my original muse was JollyBot, which is the mascot that you see everywhere. And it's named after my daughter, who we call JollyBug. And when we started using JollyBot everywhere, I felt kind of weird using JollyBot for mine because it was like it was just too close to home. So I made kind of a cactus version, which is Marlowe, which I like a lot, especially Marlowe's little cactus.

I love the fuzzy laptops. Just send me. They are so funny. They're really funny. Okay. Well, walk me through some things that you do with Marlowe that are fun. Yeah, I can show you a few things. So I think one of my favorite things recently is I had, and I would recommend doing this,

by the way, I had, if you use Instagram, I had Marlowe look at everything I'd saved on Instagram and just organize them. So put all of my saves into folders. categories, useful baseline. But then I said, okay, look at everything I've saved and maybe send me some suggestions for shopping ideas, like gifts and that kind of thing. And it did that, again, just in text, which was a good idea. But one of my favorite things I think to do with these systems is take what would be otherwise like a fairly mundane set of data and render it in a way that I personally find really fun. So with this, what you're looking at here is JollyBot Sky,

mall, which is that same set of suggestions that have looked at everything I've saved on Instagram, considered some ideas for things that I might be interested in, but then rendered them in the kind of the vernacular of the Sky Mall Sharper Image magazine. So as a 90s kid, this is like very, this is speaking my actual language. So like this clock, for example, you can see right here. It was a good suggestion. It's yours. Yeah. So this is a fun one. And I think like it refreshes every day and it's kind of like a really interesting way to like both from like just for me personally as a designer to look at because I think it's a really fun type of crazy design. But also like, you know, I may be one day in the market for a new range finder.

So it's nice to see that. I love I love this. And then have you, I just, I'm curious, have you transacted with Marlowe? Like have you bought, has Marlowe bought you some things? Yeah. And but probably not anything that. exciting, like watch straps and things like this, you know? Like I think, and I've had, like, I, one of the things I do most, actually, with mine and probably my favorite use case is, like,

I feel like a kind of just like monitoring superpower where I, like, I'm always looking for like, oh, if this artist releases a new album, tell me, okay, great. If this artist comes to San Francisco, tell me, if this golf brand does a collaboration with this person, like, I have a lot of things kind of like on the radar. And so like usually like, you know, everybody always talks about, and I remember from your thing, movie tickets, movie tickets is a big one as well. So yeah, I have and I think that it's definitely like something that is just really useful.

I haven't hooked this. That's actually something that I would like to do. I haven't hooked this up to where I can like make it easy to if I do see something I like, go and get it. But it's mostly because this is more of a fun thing for me that I just love seeing these things rendered this way. You know, the other thing that you can do here, which I do, is I have a trigger that every week it looks at the list of stuff that I'm like interested in buying and sees if any of it is on sale. And so it'll be like, you know, that thing you've been waiting for, it's it's now discounted or, you know, this, this vendor happens to be selling it on sale. And so then I just get that like just in time discount on thing.

I also do a lot of price comparison. Yeah. Yeah. And I do all the research as well, too, like whether it's price or just kind of like, what reminds me of like used to be a very manual process of like, okay, I'm in the market for a toddler car seat. You know, it's like normally that would kick off a lot of web searches, a lot of like YouTube watching and everything like this. And now it's like I usually start amused with whatever it is and then kind of go from there. Yeah. Well, and I do think people are really, I haven't heard a lot of folks talk about the Instagram connector.

one that I also use a lot. It's just a, it's a very rich source of personal information that has historically been in a format very hard to reason with. So, and now it is in a format that I can actually like reason and extract that that value out of it. I use a lot of, I use a lot of Instagram. I use, um, because now these agents can log into websites. I like, like use my Pinterest a lot more too. I use these like visual records a lot. more than I had in the past one kind of like for the designers out there one of the things that I've done recently is like open up a board or a saved group and said like I like this help me generate concepts based on this or language I can use to describe this and so I think the ability

for these agents to reason with visual data in a way especially if you can just log into a website or use an Instagram connector just really unleashes a lot of creativity use cases I feel like have been harder to do before. Yeah, then Pinterest is a great idea, too. I mean, I think, like, you know, to your point, the, I feel like I have scattered about the internet a lot of this information that's kind of just gotten lost to time, you know. And so, like, my Instagram saves for better for worse. I've been using that forever, but I very rarely go back and mill about in there and, like,

look at them, you know, because it's like you're kind of just, I don't know what I would be doing necessarily. One thing I did actually, I don't have it here. But I do save a lot of golf tips, but like hundreds, like hundreds and hundreds of golf tips that I'd never go back in and look at. So I had Marlow do it and then consolidate them all into like a manual. And so that I had this like kind of like for Alex, like these are the things you should work. Apparently you think you should work on, you know. And it was that that was pretty cool because it was like otherwise kind of just buried in time, you know.

And actually to that end, I have this one too, which I like, this is another Instagram one. I do post a lot of stories. And this one is basically just showing me an archive of random stories from the past that, again, I would never look at. And it's kind of like, I mean, I almost think of this is like my new kind of feed that I'm looking at where it's like, you know, this is just mine, but you could bring in any kind of content here. And like I love looking at this kind of stuff. It's just kind of like nice memories. And I'll check it a couple times a day. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And like I, you know, have a five-year-old. So it's fun seeing like little things of her like when she was growing up. up. Okay, you mentioned golf and we're going to talk about Muse 4 going hard on your hobbies. So let's talk about how are you using Muse for your golf game, which I, you know, as a parent of a 5-year-old, I'm presuming is inconsistent at best. I know. Yeah, I used to always joke about this with people on the team because a lot of what I would want to use Muse 4 was golf oriented, but that sort of assumed that I was able to play golf, but like we've been building this project for.

for so long, but it's like kind of very few and far between when I'm able to get out there. But yeah, I use it in a couple ways. And I think what's nice about this is similar to some of my other hobbies like chess. There are services already that I use that monitor, like, how I'm playing. So every time I play, I record the round. That's the thing most golfers do. And so that's like some basic data about the course that you played, what your score was. But I also keep track of every shot that I hit on a watch.

And so I have a lot of data that I can provide. And what I do is I just have it every week, which is, this is again kind of sad because it looks every Sunday and I never play. So it's like I could probably just tell it every so often. But it will send me this basically every time I play, which is kind of like a round recap. So I'll see kind of like how the round unfolded, much richer than like a paper scorecard or some other way that I'd be able to see it. And sometimes, I don't think this one has it in here, it will tell me a little bit about the course. if I played the course a lot and it will like tell me okay on this whole this is usually what's happened you did better today or worse today which is really helpful when I go back and play the course

again this one's doing a little bit of that like it's trying to tell me like how I could have turned my 84 into a 79 by just like doing a little bit better here or there the interesting thing about this and again we've talked a little bit about this but I think like it's taking data that like was pretty much very plain and monolithic and not really showing me more than the number and turning it into these different visuals that, like, tell much more of a story. Like, I had this, the red line is like a very bad front nine, and then the back nine was a very good back nine. You can see that with the graph, like, very easily. That'd be much harder to do if you're at the scorecard. So this has been great. I also, whenever I practice, I have a lot, I feel like

when I'm practicing, I'm like those people you see running with oxygen on with all the wires hooked up to I'm like when I I can only practice every so often. So when I practice, it has to be very, very data oriented. So I have all these machines that are looking at me when I swing. And this, again,

it's like putting out all this stuff that like I kind of understand, but it's really helpful to get me used to like really go through and like tell me about like where I can improve like what I need to do better, what's looking good. And that's what you're looking at here was like a practice session really broken down into the fine detail. I think like golfers will know. what this stuff means, but it's kind of, you know, it's kind of like, it's very useful, I should say.

And do you have a muse goal to get better? I do. I have. And this is one that, yeah, like I said, kind of a sad one I make no progress against, but that is one of my long-term goals. So I have a lot I mentioned of things that I'm tracking. I love the tracking section in particular just because, like, there's a lot that I keep an eye on. But in terms of long-term goals, it's basically, I'm I would really like to be a single-digit handicap in my life, which is like it's achievable. It's hard. It's kind of like the perfect goal because I can talk to Meuse about it anytime. And like it knows that all these things are kind of like accrue into that goal.

It's kind of the perfect like hopefully not super long-term goal, but it is definitely one of my main ones. Quick question about Muse. And this could be maybe personal preference or you could just give our audience a little bit of insider tips. on how to use it. Main chat or side chats? I haven't decided if one is better than the other. My impulse is towards side chat and I don't know if that's just an artifact of how I've been working with other chatbots or if it's actually useful. It's a great question. This is actually one of my favorite things to talk about because I think it's such an interesting architectural problem in the space. And the way Muse is designed is there's a canonical

main chat, that is kind of very intentionally the primary main line. And we sort of feel like you could use that entirely if you wanted to. We know that for a lot of people, especially anyone that's used to the way most of these apps work today, that threading is a very useful way to organize. So we have side chats for that purpose. Like if you want to put something specifically in, like just to get it out of your main chat, or it's like a very scoped problem for whatever, whatever it is, there's lots of reasons why you might want to do it. That's why side chats are there, but it is definitely like a single thread with the possibility of side threads, whereas most apps are all threaded. That's kind of like the traditional model was like a new thread every time you open it, you know. And I think once

the models were able to handle the context and be able to manage everything in a single chat, to me, that is a little bit easier way to interface with what you feel like as another entity, the same way you would have with another person. You know, like I don't side thread with my mom or something like that, you know. Now, all that said, I think that there remains a lot of really interesting work to do to kind of like up-level this to maybe you could say like the agenic era. I feel like even still, this is sort of an under-explored area where I'm very happy with our solution currently because we've sort of like exposed the benefit of the main chat to people. But I feel like there's a lot more that we could do in terms of helping people organize and, like, really understand the difference

between the main chat and the side chat, because your question, I think, is a good one. And one that, you know, a normal person could very reasonably come to too and just be like, why would I use this instead of that? And I think all that stuff can be, I think it's going to be an exciting area in the future. Okay. Show me your last hobby. Oh, yeah. Artifact that you've made. Yeah. Well, I'll show you. One I wanted to show you was this one. with a podcast attached because I think this one's very fun.

So I had a blog 20 years ago, which has again lost a time. And I had Marlow go and find it, way back machine going to blogger. It moved between Tumblr school. I moved it all around. So it went back and found all the posts and then accumulated them into one PDF first, then this little thing that is basically just like looks like a blog. But the way that I like to read it now, just again, for memorandum, is via a podcast, which is sent to me every morning,

and it is just basically a random reading. You can hear a little bit. Is it weird to anyone else that 90% of people wear the exact same color pants? Which is the kind of thing that a 20 years ago Alex used to wonder about. And it's like very, very funny because you're hearing yourself, kind of, but 20 years ago, you barely remember anything. You know, so like I, everything that this.

person is saying, I'm like, yeah, that is kind of weird. But it's like, of course I would think that, because it was me. It was me. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I think like that one, I love that one because like a lot of these things, I guess you could say sort of a theme here, which is like, I feel like I'm constantly taking these things that I had in my life, but like, for whatever reason, like, I do not look at them. I can't, like, it's presented in such a way that it wasn't useful for me at the time or whatever. And Muse is able to take it and just like, read, you know, form it into a way that's like really interesting and useful for me. Whether it's interesting like this or useful like the golf stuff or, you know, I have the same thing for chess as well, which

will break down my recent games. And this one gets a little bit like snarky, I guess you could say. I didn't tell it to do this, but it like kind of like will poke at me a little bit, which is kind of like Bishop E5 collapse. Like I don't know what is this what's going on here. But anyway, so it's It's a fun, that's a fun one because it's useful, but it's also kind of funny to have like this. I guess you could say like kind of snarky chess coach that's trying to help me get better. Well, and for folks that aren't watching, this is a dashboard that I think pulls in your chess.com data, right? And just renders it and gives you game by game breakdowns. I really like this.

Yeah. It's been useful because, and you know, the fun thing is you basically just define this in chat. You know, so when I originally asked for this, I said, I have a chess account. I would love to see kind of a mixture of analysis, but also like trends over time because it's helpful for me to know, like, am I improving? It looks like right now I'm kind of like falling off a bit. But then the main thing that I wanted to do in this case is give me a review of the most recent game. So I can go through here and try to get a sense of like, what did I do wrong? In this case, I just quit midgame.

So that's not, it would be that helpful. But, you know, when the daughter arrives home, you have to stop playing. That's exactly right. Okay, so we have seen Marlowe do everything from revive old Instagram posts and blogs to give you a custom and kind of nostalgic shopping catalog to taking all. You seem like a data person, taking all your data you collect and especially for some of your hobbies and let you put it in a way that will allow you to achieve either short term or long term goals. And then we talked a lot about, you know what, why I think a lot of people are reacting so positively to muse is because it's well designed. It's thoughtful. It shows you what you need. It's fast. And we all have these like little cutie pie cutie pie avatars. Well, let's do very quick lightning round questions. And then I will get you back to all your important work. First question is just, I think designing these agent experiences and AI experiences are, very new to a lot of designers and a lot of PMs. The surfaces are new. The underlying infrastructure and technology is new. What did you have to learn? And then what were you able to

kind of like fall back on that has worked forever from a design perspective? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I think one thing that I have found for myself and any designer kind of coming into this project or really just this space is really wrapping your head around what a not non-deterministic system is and how what that means for when you're designing a screen and by that I mean like we're used to and through for my whole career you would come to a feature and you would be able to think about it and then design it and kind of know that like on any given customer screen it's basically going to work like this and look like this because that is the way that this thing has been coded and that is the only outcome that you will see, you know. And so then the bugs that you would see would be like, oh, no, like this

circle didn't appear where it's supposed to. And it'd be very, very scoped in terms of like what you you had to think about. And I mean, it sounds like kind of routine to us now to talk about this, but like you're saying in terms of things I had to learn, it's hard to remember what it felt like even just a year ago, how different things were. You know, but when you first come into this space, I think really understanding that these systems usually do like kind of, kind of, you know, end up the way you think, but like my muse setup is completely different than yours, is completely different to somebody else's. They're so personal and they can like do so many different things that you really kind of have to think more about the underlying foundation and the system, the

architecture, the scaffolding that's in place, and less about like, well, what about this one little thing here? Is it going to be just so, you know, actually one of the things that's hardest for me sometimes is looking at those artifacts that we were looking at. Like I kind of have to turn off my brain sometimes design-wise because I'm like, you know, it's like it's a different, you can if you want, go and spend all the time in the world to like make it look exactly as you want. But I've come to kind of view it a little bit more freely and it's kind of, I think, kind of liberating in some ways to feel like, you know, this is still just a very useful output for me. And maybe I will take the time to make the colors just so, but otherwise it's good and it's fine, you know? And I think like that's

kind of a fun new world and that took some getting used to, I would say. is a very, a very gentle approach to the spectrum of slop to high quality Asian design stuff that we get out of our agents. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of you didn't get the colors quite right. When your muse, when Marlowe is being obstinate and not giving you what you want from a quality perspective, you know, just not listening.

What is your prompting strategy? What do you do? Yeah. not like a well-formed one in the sense that I didn't I suppose ever reason about it but I am very polite I think I'm not I'm not all caps I'm not a multi-exclamation mark person and I do find myself sometimes looking at what I wrote and be like wow that was really nice way just to express that frustration and I think it's really interesting and I feel this way when I'm doing any kind of coding thing as well where things you know can well maybe take a really long time and then go sideways

and it is really frustrating. 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. Like I don't, I don't ever really get mad to other people, so I don't really get mad to Marlowe or Jollybut or otherwise, you know. Yeah. So I don't know. It's always how I've been, I have seen, I have some friends who show me sometimes like the traces when they have gotten really mad. The thinking trace will be, will be like, of a reset, like, okay, Alex is frustrated. So I should really, you know, so it does make me think sometimes I could probably be a little bit more forceful. More effective. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I also try to generally be polite with the exception of what feels like very expensive, misaligned coding,

misadventures. That's the one that like really gets me. Yeah. And to be honest, every time I'm yelling, it is true to agents as it is in life. It's usually a me problem. Yeah. Not a them problem. It's a me problem. But you're right though. Like they go off on the misadventure. It's like that's yeah. It's not frustrating. Well, Alex, this has been so fun. Thank you for being so generous with their time. We love Muse. I'm excited to see more of it as it evolves. Where can we find you? How can we be helpful and how can we follow along? The most helpful thing would be to download Muse, try it out, and you can let Muse know when something isn't going right or you want to feature. Those do come to us. So that's probably the most helpful thing. I think for me,

like on the internet, threads is probably the best place. I've been trying to do some posting about the behind the scenes and like kind of some decisions that we made and I'll continue to do that. So that's probably what I would say. But yeah, trying the app out and letting us know what you think is the most useful thing. So amazing. Well, thank you for joining Hawaii AI. Yes, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at how IAIIPod.com. See you next time.