Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · October 2026
Cornell, a design director at Meta, is explaining how the Muse agent was designed for ordinary people rather than engineers. He goes on to describe layering detail through progressive disclosure, so that the full activity log is there only for people who want it.
…screen. And I think that, even something like that, 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.
…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 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…
I'll give you one other compliment because again, I am a Muse girl now, but I also think that a lot of times these chain of thought reasoning user elements in the UI are there as a band-aid for latency, which is, it feels very frustrating as a user to sit and wonder, is my agent working on…
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, cause it's, it's so quick. And I think, like, the nice thing is there are times…
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, when 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…