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

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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.

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What you’ll learn:

Why Alex built Muse to feel like messaging, not an AI app
How Muse’s three-layer status system accommodates different levels of technical expertise
What generative UI actually means in a shipped consumer product
How Alex turned years of forgotten Instagram saves into a daily shopping catalog
Why his mom apologized to her Muse, and what it means for AI design
How he uses Muse to track his golf game, shot by shot, as he works toward a single-digit handicap
The mindset shift designers need when the output is never pixel-perfect
When to use the main chat versus a side chat, and where the architecture still falls short