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

About this episode

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 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 — Brought to you by