What this is
Meta's Muse Agent has taken the top spot in the US App Store's Productivity category — over 100,000 ratings, 4.9 stars. In the same week, Meta fully open-sourced the Muse Gadget SDK, bringing us non-engineers closer than ever to "building our own AI device."
Read the two together and the message is clear: Meta is no longer building "yet another AI app" — it wants an agent ecosystem. An open-source SDK means anyone can graft Muse's capabilities onto a developer board with a screen, microphone, and sensors, and build "desktop assistants," "e-ink calendars," "smart home control hubs," and the like. Meta has already shown reference builds on Waveshare AMOLED, M5Stack, and Raspberry Pi hardware.
Traditional AI gives you answers; an agent — an AI that can execute tasks on your behalf — gets things done for you. And the moment an agent needs to control real-world devices, it needs "hands" and "eyes." That's the layer the SDK handles.
Industry view
The bull camp says this is the only path forward. For agents to truly take over our lives, apps alone won't cut it — we're not going to open up the APIs of our door locks, air conditioners, and factory equipment to some unverifiable third party. By open-sourcing the SDK, Meta is effectively handing the "how agents take action" specification to the community — essentially replaying Apple's App Store playbook of wooing developers early.
But the skeptics are just as pointed. One founder who's been tracking agent products long-term told us: Muse handles email, calendars, bank cards, social accounts — any single mistake on this data carries far higher stakes than "AI got a question wrong." An open-source SDK means a larger attack surface, and an agent's real moat is trust, not model capability. Another practitioner is more pessimistic: we can't even reliably get an agent to "book a restaurant for me" — getting it to manage our money is still a long way off.
Impact on regular people
For enterprise IT: Over the next 1–2 years, we expect a wave of "neither-PC-nor-phone" AI terminals — meeting room assistants, small boxes next to retail POS stations, dashboard panels on factory floors. Enterprise procurement lists may need a new line item: "Agent hardware."
For individual professionals: White-collar workflows will get carved up another layer by agents. Once AI can book meeting rooms, reply to emails, and organize schedules directly, our time shifts from "doing the work" to "reviewing the agent's actions" — we no longer do it ourselves, we sign off on it.
For the consumer market: Regular people will experience for the first time that "AI devices" and "smart speakers" are not the same thing. Smart speakers only respond passively; agent devices will actively invoke permissions and execute tasks across apps. Privacy anxiety will quickly move from discussion to a real problem.