alexcornell@alexcornell8h ago

When I look back at the earliest @Muse mocks, the very first thing that was designed was the “status” pill at the top of the screen. That one tiny piece of UI survived every subsequent revision, many months on. It remains one of my favorite parts of the design. Its purpose is to simply and clearly answer the question: what is my agent doing right now? And do that across every surface of the app. Representing status in this way is more of a messaging pattern and was kind of controversial early on. Most AI apps had coalesced around “chain of thought” as the way to represent ongoing work, which almost always appeared at the bottom of the thread itself. I had a petulant aversion to this and it didn’t work anyway, given the initial app was already three tabs (feed, chat, library). A persistent status display was necessary. The initial version didn’t have the avatar and was only capable of ~6 deterministic states. Even in that basic form it was incredibly useful during testing – just showing connection status was critical in those early days. Excited to share some more stories about the design of Muse. I haven’t tweeted in a few years as I’ve just been working away, but I think this will be a fun story.