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.
Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
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
** WorkOS**—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more
(▶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
• Meta Muse: https://muse.ai
• 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
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-cornell-5449a99
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.
