Muse funciona porque Meta trató al agente como una entidad con la que conversas, no como una app que operas, y de esa metáfora derivó cada decisión de UI, velocidad y arquitectura.
Muse de Meta funciona porque su equipo lo diseñó como una entidad con la que conversas, no como una app que operas, y de esa metáfora salieron todas las decisiones de interfaz, velocidad y arquitectura. Alex Cornell cuenta cómo los patrones de mensajería humana encajan mejor que los de productividad cuando el agente puede iniciar él la charla, trabajar solo y tocar tus datos, y por qué la transparencia por niveles evita abrumar sin ocultar lo técnico. Escúchalo si estás diseñando un agente y quieres entender por qué la velocidad percibida necesita dos palancas —modelo rápido y acuses de recibo tempranos— y no solo una.
Meta diseñó Muse como un agente de inteligencia artificial que se siente más una conversación con una persona que una herramienta de software, y esa decisión de base explica por qué la gente lo adopta con tanta facilidad. Alex Cornell, director de diseño del proyecto, cuenta en el podcast cómo esa metáfora conversacional guió cada decisión visual y funcional del producto.
El punto de partida fue reconocer que los agentes actuales ya no son chatbots pasivos: pueden escribirte sin que se lo pidas, trabajar en segundo plano y actuar sobre tus datos personales. Eso cambia el problema de diseño. En lugar de inspirarse en apps de IA tradicionales, el equipo miró patrones de mensajería: burbujas de chat, un avatar en la parte superior de la pantalla, estados visibles de "está trabajando". La idea es que estás intercambiando mensajes con una entidad, no operando una interfaz.
De ahí sale una de las claves del producto, la divulgación progresiva. Un ingeniero quiere ver cada llamada que hizo el agente; una persona normal solo quiere saber si está haciendo algo. Muse resuelve ambos niveles capa por capa: arriba un estado tipo "Jolly bot está buscando campos de calabazas"; si tocas, aparece la lista de pasos; si vuelves a tocar, llegas al código y los curl de las peticiones. Lo técnico está, pero no estorba.
Una línea legible por cualquiera que indica qué está haciendo el agente ahora
Jolly bot está buscando campos de calabazas
Al tocar, se despliega la secuencia de acciones del agente
Para el usuario curioso que quiere entender el flujo
Otro toque muestra código y las peticiones curl completas
Para el ingeniero que quiere auditar cada llamada
Cornell subraya que esa narración paso a paso no es solo transparencia, también es un parche para la latencia. Cuando un modelo tarda, el usuario necesita saber que no está atascado. Muse combina dos cosas: el modelo es rápido de verdad, y cuando una tarea es larga el agente responde primero con una reacción o un plan corto antes de desaparecer a trabajar, igual que haría una persona a la que le pides un favor complicado.
Las primitivas que Muse eleva son otra decisión diferenciadora. Mientras otros agentes giran en torno a hilos, archivos, diffs y conectores —vocabulario de ingeniero—, Muse pone al frente el personaje con avatar, los chats, las ideas y el feed. La madre de Cornell le mandó un mensaje disculpándose con su Muse por hacerlo trabajar tanto: ese es el tipo de usuario al que apunta el producto.
| Muse (consumo) | Otros agentes (ingeniería) | |
|---|---|---|
| Unidad central | Personaje con avatar | Hilo de ejecución |
| Interacción | Chats y feed | Archivos y diffs |
| Entrada de ideas | Ideas sugeridas | Conectores y prompts |
| Usuario diana | La madre de Cornell | El desarrollador |
| Metáfora | Conversación con alguien | Operar una herramienta |
La "UI generativa" en Muse no significa que todo cambie cada vez. Las estructuras principales son estables; lo que se genera son los detalles delicados: las ideas sugeridas se basan en tus conversaciones, el emoji del estado se elige en el momento, el avatar que elegiste aparece animado escribiendo en un portátil. Si tu Muse es un tomate, verás un tomate tecleando. Esa generatividad acotada es más utilizable que la ambición de "cada pantalla única".
| Estable (estructura) | Generado (detalle) | |
|---|---|---|
| Layout general | Chat, avatar, feed e ideas en su sitio | — |
| Ideas sugeridas | — | Se basan en tus conversaciones recientes |
| Emoji del estado | — | Se elige en el momento según la tarea |
| Avatar | Lo eliges tú (ej. un tomate) | Se anima tecleando en un portátil |
| Resultado | Interfaz utilizable y predecible | Delight sin perder consistencia |
Cornell muestra casos de uso que ilustran el patrón de fondo: tomar datos que ya tenías pero que estaban enterrados y mal presentados, y reformatearlos en algo útil o divertido. Pidió a Marlo (su Muse, un cactus) que ordenara todas sus guardados de Instagram y le propusiera regalos, y luego los renderizó al estilo del catálogo Sky Mall de los 90. Rescató su blog de hace 20 años, lo compiló en PDF y ahora lo consume como un podcast diario. Para su golf, convirtió los datos crudos de un reloj en recaps visuales con gráficas que explican por qué su 84 pudo haber sido un 79. Para ajedrez, un dashboard tipo entrenador snarky analiza sus partidas de chess.com.
Marlo ordena los saves y propone regalos
Se compila en PDF y se consume como podcast diario
Datos crudos del reloj convertidos en recaps visuales
Dashboard tipo entrenador snarky
Sobre la arquitectura de conversación, Muse apuesta por un chat principal canónico con side chats opcionales, al revés que la mayoría de apps que usan hilos nuevos por defecto. La idea: no abres un hilo nuevo con tu madre cada vez que le hablas. Aun así, Cornell admite que es un área sin resolver y que falta trabajo para que el usuario entienda cuándo conviene cada formato.
Al final, Cornell deja dos lecciones de proceso. La primera es que diseñar para sistemas no deterministas rompe el hábito de maquetar píxel a píxel; hay que diseñar andamios en vez de pantallas finales. La segunda, sobre prompting, es que ser educado funciona: cuando un amigo suyo se enfadó con el agente, la traza interna reaccionó con un "Alex está frustrado, debería recalibrar". La implicación para quien construye productos de IA de consumo: la metáfora conversacional, la velocidad real y la divulgación progresiva pesan más que exponer toda la potencia de golpe.
Trata al agente como a una persona a la que pides un favor
La traza de pensamiento interpreta la actitud del usuario
Resultados más alineados y, si hay fricción, recalibra
El usuario sigue tratándolo como entidad, no como herramienta
Sin figura interactiva. Fox la hace cuando la pieza explica un mecanismo; puedes pedirla igualmente.
Para tu TDA inatento, Fox debería mostrar por defecto solo un estado corto ('revisando mantenimiento del chalet'), con detalles técnicos escondidos tras una capa. Evitas la sobrecarga ejecutiva de ver todo a la vez pero conservas acceso al log cuando lo necesites depurar.
El caso Sky Mall / blog antiguo es exactamente tu visión de Fox como brain dump biográfico: no se trata de que escribas más, sino de que Fox resucite notas sueltas, chats, fotos y las devuelva en formatos consumibles (podcast diario, recap semanal). El valor está en revivir lo enterrado, no en capturar más.
El patrón 'avísame si pasa X' encaja directo con tu módulo de vigilancia atmosférica/social/espacial: define a Fox como agente que escribe primero cuando detecta anomalías (tormentas solares, cortes de red, alertas sanitarias), no como panel que tienes que ir a consultar. Encaja con tu modelo de no supervisión constante.
Para Roastr, aplica el patrón 'persona que dice ok antes de desaparecer': cuando detecte un comentario tóxico, que confirme visiblemente al cliente que lo está procesando antes del análisis largo. Reduce la sensación de caja negra que mata la confianza en herramientas de moderación automatizada.
Camillion sirve a empleados de restaurantes/retail no técnicos — igual que la madre de Cornell. Apuesta por un hilo canónico por empleado con side chats para tareas puntuales, en vez de un hilo nuevo por checklist. El vocabulario debe ser de consumo (avatar del supervisor, mensajes, evidencias), no de software (tickets, flujos, estados).
Una lección corta con un quiz, y un tutor que te pregunta en vez de resumir. Todo sale de este documento.
Si esto da una idea para mejorar Fox, conviértelo en propuesta. No se crea nada hasta que la apruebes.
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 marlo 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 reform 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 i ai i'm claire veau 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 work os 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 copilot needs to see your entire code base your chat bot 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 work os 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 open ai perplexity and cursor are already using work os to move faster and meet enterprise demands join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at work os.com start building today alex welcome to how iai 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 um 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 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 stripped those out and that is there among other reasons to like help with the like separation that you need when like a 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 uh thinking about how did this work before in different ai apps or using kind of like the traditional uh 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 um 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 is 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 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 uh software centric concepts um 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 you have these um you have your feed like you you've just chosen different aspects to elevate is that because you knew that this 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 um you know i i i got a text actually from 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 in design and it's 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 uh 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 jolly bot is working and then your next question might be what's it working on you know 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 it'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 you see like a lot of uh 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 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 band-aid for latency which is it feels very um 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 um versus how much do we kind of like do progressive disclosure and what i what i think is nice about um 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 um that i thought was quite nice but also it's just fast like it is just fast the model is just fast like i do think for especially something that's going to try to catch the eye of consumers that latency really matters and it's it's a zippy little agent yeah it is and it's it's really uh 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 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 alone yeah one other thing just thinking about this status um message i want to talk
about which is these this concept of generative ui and i think a lot of people think 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 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 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 and much easier to understand for folks trying to understand how they can 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 you know perhaps one day we'll get there you know but i think these days there's 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 its 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 states 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 than they do it's like the the you can write anything you want in the prompt and and and get a feed of whatever like i mix and 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 flight 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 gonna 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 is slime and slime is the pink dinosaur um fashioned after my child's favorite favorite stuffy um and he is very adorable okay so let's look at look at mario oh yeah so mine is marlo which is a cactus and i i have a bit of a complex relationship with marlo because my original muse was jolly bot which is the the mascot that that you see everywhere and it's named after my daughter who we call jolly bug and when we started using jolly bot everywhere i felt kind of weird using jolly bot for mine because it was like it was just too close to home so i made kind of a cactus version which is marlo which i like a lot especially marlo's little cactus i love the fuzzy laptops just send me they are so funny they're really okay well walk me through some some things that you do with marlo that are fun yeah uh i'll 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 marlo look at everything i'd saved on instagram and just organize them so
put all of my saves into folders and categories useful baseline um but then i said okay look at everything i've saved and maybe send me some uh 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 jolly about 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 my actual language um so like this clock for example you can see right here was a good suggestion it's yours yeah so this is a fun one and i think like it's refreshes every day and it's kind of like a 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 rangefinder 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 marlo on like have you bought has marlo bought you some things yeah i and but probably not anything that exciting like watch straps and things like this you know like i think uh 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 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 tell like i have a lot of things kind of like on on the radar and so like usually like you know ray always talks about and i remember from your thing movie tickets movie tickets is a big one as well um so yeah i have and uh i think that it's definitely like something that is um it's just really useful i haven't hooked this that's actually something 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 at a 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 yeah and i did i do a lot of research as well too like whether 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 it's one that i also use a lot it's just 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 use i like use my pinterest a lot more too i use these like visual records a lot more um 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 um especially if you can just log into a website or use a an instagram connector just really unleashes a lot of creativity use cases i feel like have been harder to do before yeah event pictures 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 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 um but i do save a lot of golf tips and but like hundreds like hundreds and hundreds of golf tips that i'd never go back in and look at so i had marlo do it and then consolidate them all into like a manual and so that i have 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 but 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 um and it's kind of like i mean i almost think of this as 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 okay you mentioned golf and we're going to talk about muse for 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 five-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 i a lot of what i would want to use use for was golf oriented but that sort of assumed that i was able to play golf but like we've been building this project for so long but it's like kind of very few and far between between where 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 um 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 a 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 one is 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 with the graph like very easily that'd be much harder to do if you're looking at the 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 them like when i 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 it's you know it's kind of like uh it's a it's very useful i should say and and do you have a muse goal to get better i do i have and this 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 of mentioned of things that i'm tracking i love the tracking section in particular just because like i there's a lot that i keep an eye on but in terms of long-term goals it's basically 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 me use about it anytime and like it knows that all these things
are kind of like a crew into that goal it's kind of the perfect like hopefully not super long-term goal but it is definitely uh one of my main ones quick quick question about muse and this could be maybe personal preference or you could just give our audience a little bit of insider um tips on how to use it main chat or side chats i haven't decided yeah if one is better than the other i like my my impulse is told towards side chat and i don't know if that's just a 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 um because i think it's such an interesting architectural problem in the space and you know 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 um 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 um 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 a another entity the same way you would have with another person you know like i don't side thread with my 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 agentic era i feel like even 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 uh 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 um so i had a blog 20 years ago uh which has again lost to time and i had marlo go and find it way back machine going to blogger it is a move between tumblr school like i've moved it all around you know 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 from memory is via a podcast uh which is sent to me every morning and it is just basically a random reading you can hear a little bit 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 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 20 years ago yeah yeah but anyway i think like that one i love that one because like a lot of these things there's i guess you could say it's sort of a theme here which is like 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 the 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 reform 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 um will break down my recent games and this this one gets a little bit like uh 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 uh which is kind of fun like bishop b5 collapse like i don't know what this is what's going on here but anyway so it's a fun uh that 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 so 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 um 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 um 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 mid-game so that's not going to be that helpful but you know when the daughter arrives home you have to stop playing so that's exactly right okay so we have seen
marlo 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 um 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 it shows you what you need it's fast um and we all have these like little cutie pie cutie pie avatars well let's do very quick lightning round um questions and then i will get you back to all your important work um first question is just i think designing these agent experiences um and ai experiences are very new to a 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 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 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 had to think about and i mean it sounds like kind of uh routine to us now to to talk about this but like you're saying in terms of things i had to learn it's 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 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 um 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 that's kind of a fun new world and that took some getting used to i would say that is a very a very gentle approach to the spectrum of slop to high quality asian design stuff yeah we get out of our agents yeah okay speaking of you didn't get the colors quite right when your muse when marlo 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 well 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 will maybe take a really long time 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 marlo or jolly bud or otherwise you know um yeah so i don't know i've 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 kind 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 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 yeah 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 your time um we we love muse i'm excited to see more of it um 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 uh threads is probably the best place um i try to i've been trying to do some posting about the um 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 how iai 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 howiaipod.com see you next time