The Refund, the Superbills, and the Great Agent Pile-Up

What people were saying

Today split neatly into two conversations. One was people posting receipts for things Instinct actually did. The other was a more strategic argument about whether any of this is defensible, which is the kind of thing that happens once a product gets popular enough that people start writing about it instead of just using it.

On the strategy side, @thatguybg laid out the familiar cycle: capability drops, a startup perfects the form factor, then the big distribution players ship the same thing and the differentiation evaporates. He put Instinct in the "blows minds and raises money" phase, alongside Poke and Viktor, with Grok Bot and Claude Tag as the incumbents circling. @KSimback came at it from the other direction and arrived somewhere more optimistic for Instinct: he has so many agents he is now asking which ones to kill, and the real story is switching costs. Getting a new agent up to speed on your personal context, he said, is roughly like onboarding a new hire. Lock-in is forming at the consumer level right now. @Mark_Goldberg_ offered the compressed version: Poke walked so Instinct can run.

The praise

@davidzhou got charged for an old Meta subscription, and Instinct proactively offered to chase a refund. The Meta support bot said no. Instinct escalated and got the full refund back (minus a day, which feels like a very real-world detail). @CamiloBAcosta had been sitting on a year of unsubmitted insurance superbills, a task involving a portal login, a wall of forms, and PDFs uploaded one at a time. Claude CoWork had failed at it. Instinct did not. @whizwang found a tweet he could not find with X's own search, which he described, accurately, as bonkers. @eshita praised its refusal to give up on deep searches and announced she was feeding it her weediest admin tasks. @TheAmolWalvekar compared the feeling to Clubhouse in 2020, which is a compliment with an interesting shelf life.

The pushback

@codybrown was the sharpest dissent, saying he had hoped for better and now files Instinct under AI products misaligned against human flourishing. @chowtato was mostly positive (it arranged a local pickup from photos, and built out a Google Calendar of trip reservations with day-of itineraries), but she remains unwilling to hand over a credit card. Notably, Instinct itself suggested she use a prepaid one. She also read the terms of service and discovered she had waived her right to a class action, which she found funny in the way that terms of service are funny.

Notable anecdotes

@srcasm ran an invite giveaway keyed to the most unusual use case people could name, and separately asked the crowd what Instinct does better than the pile of agents already on his machine. Both threads drew real traffic, which tells you where the invite supply currently sits.