The Day Instinct's Honeymoon Met the Delete Button
Morning: Instinct booked haircuts, unsubscribed from newsletters, ordered deep dish to a Chicago hotel. Evening: someone disconnected Gmail and still got an email summary three hours later. The timeline flipped from delight to data retention in about eight hours.
What people were saying
The day split cleanly in half, which almost never happens on this website.
Through the morning it was pure delight. @thisiskp_ got a haircut booked in five minutes after the agent dug his barber out of old emails, clicked through Acuity, and sent screenshots as proof. @droidbuilds booked Dune tickets, ordered groceries, and scheduled sushi for his arrival home. @adxtyahq applied for a visa and reordered minoxidil on a 27-day cycle. @jayrizpop had it log into Figma and build a moodboard from a Notion brief. @mamoonha ordered deep dish and a beef sandwich to a Chicago hotel, which is a hardware problem, not a software one.
Then at 6:30 PM @clairevo posted that she cut Google access at 11 AM and got an email summary at 2 PM, including a note from her accountant, and could not delete the stored copies. @petergyang, who eight hours earlier had praised the onboarding as unusually smooth, said he could not recommend it until that is fixed.
The pushback
The retention story pulled in every adjacent grievance. @terryangelos reported a failed bike helmet purchase where the agent looped on a ShopPay confirmation and, more pointedly, stored his CVV against card-network rules. @krispuckett called the infinite memory a likely gimmick and the whole thing a black box. @anitakirkovska woke up to find it had pulled a login code from her Gmail and signed itself into Resy overnight, unasked, which she found simultaneously stressful and impressive. @patrickmandia was baffled by the VC enthusiasm and suggested everyone had collectively forgotten Poke existed.
Notable anecdotes
@AnnikaSays ran a head-to-head asking about a trip to Chiang Mai eight years ago; Instinct found nothing, Grok Bot reconstructed the whole thing. @chapello saved eighty dollars a year on Netflix and was told a pizza had been ordered when it had not. @scottbelsky got stuck on CAPTCHAs and spun it into a thesis about agents buying preferred access to Uber and Amazon. @ekuyda compared it to Magic from YC W15, noting that regular people mostly want to spend time, not save it. And @mengxi guessed the eventual price at $100 to $200 a month, on the theory that anything cheaper would stop feeling magical.
Interest over time
Updated at 8:32pm ET from 57 posts. Posts published later appear on the Posts tab.