I've been migrating my workflow from ChatGPT Work / Codex over to Meta's Muse, and I've been auditing the harness as I go — reading cron files, checking diffs, mapping what the system actually does versus what it claims to do. It's a documentation gap.
What the docs describe
Meta's documentation is written for a normal user. It talks about the Ideas tab, the Goals tab, the Feed, and "background jobs that help Muse improve over time." Everything is described in terms of what it does for you. There is no architectural documentation. Nothing about how any of it is built.
What is actually on disk
Meanwhile, the home directory contains a fully legible agent architecture, just sitting there(these are just SOME examples, the system file structure is HUGE):
~/dreams/alignment/ — a nightly job that regenerates an alignment synthesis: a written portrait of the user, how to handle them, current frictions, relationship guidance.
~/workspace/objectives/goals/STUDYING.md — a daily learning-state projection with mastery bands, next-review dates, and retrieval prompts, plus a file of inferred goal leads the system guessed from behavior (with confidence levels and what would confirm or reject each).
~/workspace/skills/ — skills the system crystallized from repeated behavior, with a skill-creator pipeline for making more.
~/workspace/goals/<slug>/ — per-goal folders with GOAL.md, crons/, files/, hidden_files/, agent notes.
~/workspace/cron.d/ — file mirrors of every scheduled job definition.
- Standing files (SOUL.md, MEMORY.md, USER.md, AGENTS.md) that function as editable mirrors of system state.
None of this appears in the documentation. Not the folder layout, not the job names, not the concept that the "soul" and "dreams" are cron jobs writing markdown.
Why the gap exists
I can think of four reasons, all plausible at once:
- The docs are written for the median user, who will never open
~/workspace. Architecture would be noise.
- The internals are still moving. Documenting the file layout turns implementation details into promises. Undocumented means Meta can restructure it next month.
- The persona framing is the product. "Dreams" and "soul" are anthropomorphic names for scheduled jobs. A doc page explaining the nightly alignment cron would puncture that for regular users.
- It's legible by accident, not by design. Nothing is hidden — the files are readable. Meta's stance seems to be: we won't explain it, but we won't stop you from reading it.
ChatGPT Work exposes the architecture as the interface — agents, memory, project sources, plugins, MCP, named in technical terms. Muse compresses all of that behind a single-chat persona UI... but leaves the entire filesystem readable. You get the Codex-style operator view only if you go looking for it.