Hello! It’s been a nonstop week of Zuckerberg—interviewing Zuckerberg, editing Zuckerberg, talking about Zuckerberg. But behind the scenes, Meta’s Muse AI agent was actually making itself useful. More below on what it did for me and the bigger question of how much of my digital life I’m willing to hand over to Meta.
Then, how I’m making the Shortcuts of my dreams without actually learning how to make Shortcuts, plus an Old Thing that Zuckerberg and I have in common.
Tonight at 6:15 p.m., I will lie on a massage table and enjoy the fruits of AI: a massage booked entirely by Thingy, my Muse. (To be clear, the massage will be performed by a human—not one of those robot masseuses, which, yes, I have tried.)
For the past few weeks, I’ve been tasking Thingy—named after New Things, naturally—with booking appointments, tracking flights, watching prices on things I want to buy, canceling subscriptions, sending me news digests and more. Basically, annoying little life-admin jobs I am happy to outsource.
Meta’s new agent platform is exactly the kind of tool I needed during my AI Takeover Year. Yes, other tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have been incrementally adding powerful agentic capabilities—like the ones I tested with The School Supply Shopping Benchmark™—but they’re far from consumer friendly, especially on mobile.
Muse is designed first and foremost to be an agent: Give it something to do and then go live your life while it does it. And it’s clearly resonating. Since launching earlier this month, Muse has climbed to the top of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store.
I talked with Zuckerberg a lot about Muse—and the privacy questions that come with giving an AI agent access to more of your life. But before you hand over the keys, here’s what you need to know about how Muse works, what it can actually do and what you’re trusting Meta with.
How it gets it done
Using Muse feels less like opening ChatGPT and more like texting back and forth with an assistant. You type what you want: “Find me a massage Friday around 6.” “Watch this flight and tell me if anything changes.” “Keep an eye on the price of this.”
Then, behind the scenes, it does the work, using its own virtual machine (or VM) in the cloud, complete with a browser. It can visit websites, fill out forms and keep working even when you close the app. You can also go to the Connectors section of the app and log in to other apps and accounts so Muse can work with them directly.
This week, Meta announced an expansion of those connections, specifically around shopping. You can hook it up to your Shopify account, Walmart, Sephora, PayPal and more. Expedia and Instacart are coming soon. That means Muse can be a personalized layer that helps you do things within any of those apps. (Amazon has, on the other hand, blocked Muse from shopping on its platform.)
Overall, Thingy has been impressively useful, quickly going off to figure out how to get things done and coming back to me with a plan or need for approval. But it isn’t perfect. I’ve had some tasks stall or Thingy will tell me it can do something it clearly can’t, like make a phone call. Meta said it is testing that calling capablity.
The Muse Mac app takes things a step further. Like Claude and ChatGPT’s computer-control features, it can access your computer and interact with apps and websites on your behalf.
How to stay safe
For sensitive actions, such as sending an email or buying something, Muse comes back and asks for your approval. In my interview with Zuckerberg, he explained that Meta built a second AI agent, called sentinel agent, whose job is essentially to watch your Muse agent and decide whether what it’s trying to do is safe.
But the biggest question for me is the privacy of my own accounts, including my passwords, and the data in them. Here are a few things Meta says on its website:
Every Muse user’s VM is isolated so no one else’s agent can access it.
It’s working on an even more encrypted VM, called the Muse Confidential VM, which not even Meta could access.
Muse doesn’t “share your conversations or the data in your virtual machine” with its ad systems.
When you connect an app or put in a username or password, they are stored in “Secure Credentials Store” where the model doesn’t see your info.
But even if you trust Meta to protect the privacy of those connected accounts, there’s another question: How much information inside them do you want Muse to be able to see?
If you connect Gmail, for example, Meta says Muse “won’t download your whole inbox.” Instead, it searches for the specific messages it needs to complete a task.
That distinction helps, but it does not completely solve the problem for me.
As you hear me tell Zuckerberg in the interview, I struggle most with connecting my personal and work email accounts. They contain confidential information I wouldn’t want exposed to Muse—or, more broadly, to Meta. Zuckerberg walked me through the security protections and limits Meta has built around that access, but I still haven’t been able to bring myself to click the button.
So Thingy has its own burner email address. It’s an inbox I can use for reservations, confirmations and other low-stakes life-admin stuff without handing over the keys to my actual digital life.
That way, I can relax a little more about the whole thing—which is convenient, since Thingy has already booked the massage.
If you’ve ever wished you could hire a second version of yourself, this is the next best thing.
HubSpot’s AI Assistant Kit helps you hand off the tasks that drain your energy, clutter your brain and steal your weekends (without needing to be a tech genius).
Here’s what’s inside:
Templates that offload 80% of your repetitive work to AI
An AI Command Center that organizes your prompts + tools for you
A 60-minute quickstart guide that gets you up and running before lunch
A built-in tracker to prove how much time you’re saving
Prompts that make ChatGPT sound like your most organized coworker
Because the goal isn’t to do it all. It’s to stop feeling like you have to. Download your free AI Assistant Kit and feel the weight lift off your shoulders today.
iPhone Shortcuts you can actually use
One of our earliest New Things videos showed you how to use the Shortcuts app to change the charging sound on your iPhone. iOS 27 just made that whole tutorial obsolete—in the best possible way.
Once you update, open the Shortcuts app, tap the + at the bottom of the screen and just describe what you want in plain English. Shortcuts will build the automation for you, and you can still go in and tweak the details afterward.
One catch: this requires an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, meaning an iPhone 15 Pro or later.
Stephen Robles is my go-to guy for Shortcuts tips and ideas—he runs an entire community dedicated to them. Here are some of his ideas to get you started:
Create a morning briefing notification with the day's weather, calendar events and reminders.
Automatically add items to a grocery list from your texts.
Send automatic happy birthday messages to friends and family.
Oh, and that charging-sound shortcut? Now it takes about 30 seconds to build. And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to watch my 27 tips for iOS 27 video.
This week’s Old Thing is a little different. During my interview with Mark Zuckerberg, I showed him a photo of himself working on an old Dell Inspiron in his Harvard dorm room. I love the photo because I had the exact same laptop in my dorm room—different college, slightly different outcome.
Names: Mark Zuckerberg and Joanna Stern
What's your old thing? Dell Inspiron 8200
What year is your old thing from? 2002
Why do you love your old thing?
Joanna Stern: I'm assuming you wrote some early code of Facebook on this [laptop].
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I think so. Although I actually think that I had a different laptop that I remember that was actually even smaller than that.
Stern: This [Dell Insiprion] was a chunky laptop.
Zuckerberg: I had one of those little netbooks. Like this little Sony Vaio netbook thing.
Stern: Yep, I loved netbooks.
Zuckerberg: Which is comical in retrospect to write any code on that, because now you have the VR setup where you have six huge big-screen monitors where you can work.
Fun fact: Those informal dirt footpaths that cut across parks—going exactly where you want instead of where the paved path leads—are called “desire paths” by urban planners. Like iPhone shortcuts but in grass!
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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