Designing Opal: Building a Personal AI Pet
A Microsoft product designer built a personal AI pet that uses agentic tool use to browse the web, post to Discord, and commit to GitHub.
“all the interfaces you use have agents running behind them, and eventually those will be the things that you have to design for”
A Microsoft Foundry designer demoed Opal, a Raspberry Pi-based AI pet built on an agent framework that browses the web, summarizes content, and autonomously commits to GitHub and posts to Discord. It illustrates how agentic infrastructure is becoming accessible enough for designers to build in months, and argues designers must learn to design for agent-driven interfaces. The signal is a developer-relations/design-culture example rather than a major industry announcement.