This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jay Eskenazi. He lives in Los Angeles and worked in user experience for 19 years. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I’m in Paris, and I’m going to Barcelona tomorrow. The trip is three weeks.
I came here for the first time last year, and it was my first long trip by myself. Last year, planning it was very stressful, and I did a ton of research.
This year was the same thing, where I had these very long notes. At this point, everyone knows that you can go to any AI tool and say: “Hey, I’m going to City X, give me an itinerary for seven days.”
I had this epiphany a few weeks ago, where I realized I had all these note files, bulleted stuff, and coffee shops to go to.
If someone gave you a list of five coffee shops and they were in five different cities, as someone who’s not familiar with the terrain, you wouldn’t necessarily know how to structure that in the course of the day. Which coffee shop goes with which museum?
So, instead of doing an itinerary, I was like: “Here’s my notes. Put them together in an organized way for me. Structure them in a logical sequence.”
I hadn’t used Claude in a while, so I tried that a little. I use Grok a lot, and I just upgraded because I wanted to play with the Grok Bot. So, I made this really fancy itinerary. I kept iterating it. It did a really good job. Then I got here and was like, “It’s not as good.”
I’m naturally curious, so I tried out Muse. I think I must’ve gotten Muse two days before I left.
I was looking at this itinerary a couple of days ago and was like, “I don’t like what it says tomorrow.” So I opened Muse and asked for an afternoon itinerary. It spat out all of this stuff. I was like: “Oh! There’s some new stuff in here.”
These are really common scenarios. Maybe there are five museums you want to go to. It takes a lot of work: this museum’s closed on Tuesday, this one’s closed on Monday, and this one’s free next Friday. The AI tools can structure that in a way that you would do if you had a thousand hours.
It’s a small thing, but when you apply that to a thousand decision points, it does a really nice job of putting those things together.
If you’re like: “Hey, I want to go get coffee, then I need something to do before I get lunch, then I want to go to the museum this afternoon.” Most of the other AI tools will just give you the list. Then you’re like, how do I get from place to place to place?
Muse would actually put it on a map with dots. I clicked a button, and it put it in Google Maps. I had this experience this weekend. None of the other tools did that.
I’m going to Barcelona tomorrow, and I’ll get there in the evening. One of the reasons I picked it was because there’s an annual festival. I timed it so I can be there for the core of the activities. But the main activities weren’t published, even last week, because they’re on some website in Spanish that didn’t have the fully fleshed-out program.
In the hourlong Uber to Versailles, I was like, “What’s the structure for Thursday?” It’s able to pull that. It’s got: this opens in the morning, this is free, this is mid-day, this is in the evening.
I don’t know if ChatGPT would have it. Maybe it would, but it doesn’t seem to output it in the same way. Also, I gave it access to my email, so it knows I’m leaving tomorrow. It has an idea tab that said, “I can map the opening night before you get there.” It’s proactive.
The other thing: I was indecisive about my plans over the last couple of days. What Muse was doing was checking the times to see what ticket availability looked like. It’s doing this proactive thing for you, where it tracks it, because options are shrinking.
As a non-developer, I set up OpenClaw in February. That took a lot of time. I had a developer friend help me for hours. Then I had all these AWS bills I didn’t understand. I’m asking it to give me a recipe; I don’t know how many tokens that’s going to cost. I ended up having to shut it down.
Muse is like OpenClaw for normies. If you’re not a tech person, these things are useful because they do what an assistant would. Anyone could set this up.
It comes back to when I worked at Expedia. These are the things that a very seasoned travel agent from 30 years ago would’ve done for you. That would be a very expensive vacation for that level of service.
I also just got access to Instinct yesterday, because I was on the waitlist. I’m very curious, but you can’t see exactly what it’s doing. It had good ideas and gave me an itinerary, but it had to put them in a Google Doc. I was also confused because I don’t remember what I told it, and it made personalized recommendations. I was like: “Wait, how did it know this?”
Muse just seems easier. It’s very fast, and it feels more responsive.
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