A Phone Plan Switched, Dune Tickets Fumbled

What people were saying

Today split cleanly into two camps: people who watched Instinct do a boring errand and felt genuine relief, and people asking why this generation of assistants is different from the last one.

The skeptic case was made most bluntly by @nbaschez, who pointed out that the promise here sounds a lot like products that shipped a year ago, and that nobody has articulated a clear reason why the new ones are better. @thattallguy made a sharper version: bot mode and giving the agent its own computer are the real shifts, but they read as features rather than moats, and any incumbent could copy them (Hermes already did). @stefdelev framed Instinct as the iPhone to Hermes's Android, less flexible, less setup, and noted nobody seems to know what model is under the hood.

On the other side, @KSimback put Instinct in a trio of products he thinks is dragging agents into mass adoption, with the pitch being that SMS is the most normie-friendly surface that exists. @vparv3 got off the waitlist and said, quietly, that it beats Poke.

The praise

The day's best endorsement came from @drewcoffman, who had been putting off changing phone plans for months. Instinct logged in, compared options, picked one, and switched him over. His framing was the good part: the win is not having to become a temporary expert in something you do not care about. That is a fairly precise description of what most errands are.

@anradu called it a brilliant product and asked for a feature: pay actual humans to place phone calls when a restaurant is not on Resy or OpenTable, which is a real gap when traveling in Europe.

The pushback

@katiewav ran what she called the ultimate test, Dune tickets, and reported that Instinct crashed repeatedly and lost its place in line while her boyfriend secured five seats. Flesh and bone remains undefeated in ticketing queues, at least for now.

Trust came up more than usual. @michaelmiraflor liked the speed and the tone but said he does not trust it yet, and was unsettled by how comfortable everyone else seems handing over logins to something that remembers forever. @imjennyzhu zeroed in on the structured vault, noting it will hold your SSN, and argued consumer assistants now need serious credential architecture. @maxwellnardi simply suggested a competitor.

Notable anecdotes

@Moonduhhh posted a review after fifteen minutes, admitting the install was mostly to signal that someone had thought of him with an invite. @andrea_fanelli was still asking for one.