Is This A Rich-People Product? The Day's Big Argument
The day's most-liked Instinct post was a bearish one: Silicon Valley solving Silicon Valley problems. Meanwhile someone's assistant flagged that their surgeon had an active malpractice suit, and half of X spent the day begging for invites.
What people were saying
Today was the first day the discourse split cleanly in two. On one side, the single most-liked post about Instinct was a critique of it. On the other, people who got in were posting logs that read like a personal chief of staff had moved into their phone.
@VinIyengar got the invite he'd publicly asked for, tried it, and came back net bearish: this whole category, he argued, serves people with a lot of money and very little time, and most humans have that ratio flipped. Booking elaborate dinners and untangling international travel is not, in fact, the median American's Tuesday. It's a fair point, delivered without snark, which is maybe why it traveled so far.
@KenWattana offered the day's other viral artifact: a taxonomy of assistant products by user vibe, in which Instinct's constituency is described as VCs who consider OpenClaw beneath them. He followed up with a less jokey claim that the incumbents are getting squeezed from both sides and only true believers will be left in a few weeks.
The praise
The counterargument arrived mostly as receipts. @jasonyuan said it was handling his surgery paperwork and, unprompted, flagged that his surgeon has an active malpractice suit. That is either the best endorsement of the week or a deeply unsettling thing to learn from a text message, and probably both.
@Claire posted a twelve-hour log across two languages and two countries: out-of-network insurance forms, WhatsApping in-network providers for appointments, sorting a book list into library hold versus interlibrary transfer versus buy, pulling school dates into her calendar, a travel insurance mess involving VRBO and multiple credit cards, unsubscribing from junk, a Zoom 10DLC regulatory SMS, and finally figuring out why a reality show wasn't loading on HBO. Notably, most of that is admin drudgery, not concierge luxury, which is roughly the rebuttal to the bearish take.
@ckubal said he came in ready to dismiss the VC hype and came out calling it one of the most impressive things he'd seen in a while. @alfaruqstories said it feels like the OpenClaw moment did.
Notable anecdotes
The invite economy hit a new pitch. @dwr and @michaelmiraflor both just asked, plainly. @DFdavidfontaine ran through a parody of switching between four productivity tools before asking for one too. And @thattallguy named the mechanism out loud: the cool-but-you-can't-have-it strategy remains undefeated, and the replies under every mention of it are the thirstiest on the timeline.
Interest over time
Written at 10:45pm ET from 12 posts. Posts published later appear on the Posts tab.