The FOMO Discourse Arrives Before Most People Get An Invite

What people were saying

Today was less about what Instinct did and more about how everyone found out about it. The day's anchor was @JasonrShuman, who called it the closest thing yet to the personal AI assistant everyone has been waiting for and described the experience as jaw dropping. That post did the numbers (400+ likes, 333 replies, most of which appear to be some variation of "invite?"), and it became the thing other people quoted all afternoon.

@saranormous added the more specific version of the same point: the interesting part is not that a model can chat, it is that you trust it to navigate websites and actually execute transactions on your behalf. Which is a real distinction, and also the part that makes people nervous, though nobody today seemed especially nervous.

The praise

@N_Sportelli reported already having a quarter's worth of self care appointments booked, which is a nice small concrete data point in a day otherwise heavy on vibes. The quoted line circulating in several posts was somebody calling it their biggest "holy shit" AI moment since Wisprflow, which is the kind of comparison that means something to a fairly specific slice of the timeline and nothing at all outside it.

The pushback

@gm_mertd took the contrarian swing, framing the whole thing as VC-manufactured FOMO, posting links so people could see for themselves, and concluding that it is basically Poke. That got 486 likes, more than the post it was dunking on, which tells you something about the market for skepticism.

@shellvish landed somewhere in between: admitted to having no idea what Instinct actually is, but praised the marketing as an excellent use of angels and early adopters to manufacture demand. It is a compliment, technically. @loganzev offered the most practical note of the day, which is that generating FOMO works right up until people cannot find anywhere to put their email address. Attention is short; give the curious a form.

Notable anecdotes

The purest expression of the day came from the invite-seekers. @katiewav asked what a girl has to do to get one. @_EricHu asked more plainly and got roughly the same result. Neither post is about the product's capabilities at all, which is either a marketing triumph or exactly the problem @loganzev was describing, depending on your priors.

Net read: a loud, largely positive day where the loudest counter-argument was not "it does not work" but "you are all being played," which is a decent position for a product to be in. Nobody today claimed it failed at a task. They mostly claimed they could not get in the door.