what a thrill! i disconnected ai bot instinct from google at 11 AM and got a summary of my emails at 2 PM here's what happened, and what i've learned

This is literally what Instinct is perfect for. I tell it to clear out emails, send WhatsApp messages, schedule appointments, and handle other tasks and I don’t even have to think twice about it. Hours of my life given back to me immediately. t.co/OQJBXQJTtz

Hey Instinct, it's not cool to index and retain my emails without my permission and not let me delete them from your records? I can't recommend this to anyone until this is figured out. Thanks @clairevo for spotting this.

somehow got so much done today with an AI agent handling the boring stuff so far today: - applied for the visa for my next international trip - reordered my minoxidil because 27 days are over and delivery takes 3 days - followed up on an email thread I completely forgot about - updated my promos calendar after a brand pushed a campaign to next week - sorted out some travel planning these are all tiny things but somehow they’re the things that eat 2-3 hours of my day fun fact: saw a reel about Instinct today, decided to try it out and gave it all of this stuff lol

Instinct is very well done. I'm particularly impressed by how smooth the onboarding experience is to connect iMessages, Google Workspace, and my MCPs. The best builder prioritize onboarding and new user needs :) Instinct also feels more proactive than some of the other assistants - it'll suggest things it can do right away after connecting a MCP. However, I can't see myself doing real work with Instinct since it's all just in one thread. This is the same issue I have with @bot, the UX is very clean but often I want to have multiple threads going with the same bot. I think I'll use Instinct more as an assistant for random chores and tasks. For actual work, I'm still sticking to ChatGPT Work and Codex. P.S. I asked Instinct if I have any invites to give out and it says invites are paused, so don't ask me for any (yet)

Finally got an Instinct invite and gave it the annoying tasks I kept putting off: - found and booked Dune tickets - ordered my groceries for tomorrow - cleaned up my Gmail and unsubscribed from junk - ordered sushi from my favorite Japanese restaurant and scheduled delivery for when I get home Honestly, if this thing keeps up, it’s gonna save me a lot of time.

Asked Instinct to recommend and order a late dinner to my hotel in Chicago. Couldn’t decide so I’m doubling up on deep dish and a beef sandwich. Wish me luck tomorrow.

Sheel’s take on why Instinct (and Grok Bot) are getting love is interesting - basically they are willing to take more risk, and let the agent access and do more without step-by-step permissions Reminds me of my pet theory about why Claude Code took off The CLI form factor, which was new at the time, had such a bad UX for trying to see what the agent is doing that it encouraged people to —dangerously-skip-permissions for the first time (whereas Cursor’s nicer diff approval UX was less painful so people kept it on). Combine this with timing of models getting good enough to trust, and you have a recipe for magic moments. Lesson for startups: risk is a nice wedge That being said, it’s a very short term advantage. ChatGPT and Claude will copy fast.

the vc glaze on instinct is baffling. did we just black out and forget poke ever existed? green oaks and kp ripping in at $500m has everyone panic tweeting about it to stay relevant.

so far today instinct has: - cleaned up my gmail by unsubscribing from all the random newsletter spam - handled some repetitive browser tasks + did research on random shi i needed to figure out - looked at some protein chocolate brands, compared ingredients/labels and gave me a quick summary - kept track of a few small things i need to follow up on and tbh this is exactly the kind of stuff id want an agent for none of these things are hard, they're just annoying as fuck, and somehow end up eating a lot of my time lol

Instinct is the ultimate cheat in 2026. Give it something once and it just handles it. Book the table. Find the tickets. Chase the email. Watch for the thing you’re waiting on. The wild part is it doesn’t feel like using AI. It feels like having a chief of staff living in your phone.

instinct is a pretty magical experience. reminds me of Magic - the hottest startup of YC W15 - except Magic did all of this with actual humans but: regular people don't care about productivity. even I had to sit and think about what to ask for. most people want to spend time, not save it and isn't this exactly where Claude and ChatGPT are headed? still rooting hard for this team. definitely one of the best products out there

Shopping on Instinct will be a great experience once payments work better. Last night, my Instinct agent tried & failed to purchase a bike helmet - The merchant used ShopPay which recognized my email and needed confirmation before proceeding - agent was stuck in a loop and didn’t know how to ask for verification - The agent vault also stored my CVV against card-network rules The right way to do this would be for Instinct to use an agentic token from Visa or perhaps to “connect to ShopPay” and have Shopify authorize the transaction. Will be fascinating to see this unfold. cc: @illscience @sytaylor

the true unlock for these new consumer agents is "Favored Agent" status. and the ultimate opportunity for businesses is to build an agent-first UX. been going deep with Instinct etc and truly mesmerized. via a simple text, I can optimize my subscriptions on Amazon, prepare for a trip to Europe, etc...all especially powerful when you feel remembered and considered by these agents. with Instinct, each time the agent needs access to a website (my credit card statement, Amazon, Airbnb, etc), it asks for my login via an encrypted link and then saves it for next time. but even the best agents still run into situations where they hit a bot check. While I am able to help the agent overcome any two-factor authentication issues, they still aren’t able to complete CAPTCHAs and other bot checks for obvious reasons (they are bots!). which leads me to an idea: What if the moat for these agent companies is to achieve “favored agent” status with direct preferred access to services like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Amex, and the long-tail of companies that otherwise guard against bots? What if the agent-service relationship becomes a new marketplace for underlying service providers (like Uber, Amazon, etc) to grant access (or perhaps even provide faster and cheaper access than humans ordinarily get?) in exchange for becoming the preferred default vendor for a particular need? What if the ultimate business model for agent companies is to strike these “default provider” deals? Or perhaps buying this “favored agent” status is the ultimate cost for these agent companies? the first “favored agents" that get proprietary and preferred access to the banks and stores and other online processes of our lives will have an incredible advantage. right now, agents are trying to navigate websites made for humans and pass login constraints designed to block bots, but favored agents that pass some level of security authentication should be able to go direct to the data and the services of the companies that we interact with daily. And the companies that open their doors to legitimate agents will prosper from this massive new and action-oriented audience, often armed with credit cards!

Instinct will announce a $50M raise in a few weeks and kick off another personal agent frenzy

I asked Instinct and Grok Bot the same question: “What did I do in Chiang Mai and what did I like?” Both had Gmail access. No further direction. Instinct couldn't find anything. My trip was eight years ago, in fairness — I knew this was a long-shot prompt to begin with. What happened with Grok @bot blew me away: it reconstructed the trip and surfaced specific things I'd written about loving. Obviously an n=1 experiment, and I think both products are great. But it was a striking reminder: connecting an agent to your data is only the beginning! How well it searches, interprets, and acts on that data is even more important.

OK I’m spending this weekend testing the limits of Instinct, @bot and @TownAI. I’ve been a heavy town user for a few months, using bot from last week, and started on instinct yesterday. I’m not affiliated to any of them and will report back what I find. t.co/8lEVhKPxr6

Instinct is built by legit people and backed by trusted investors But given how willingly people are handing over account access and payment info I just know some bad actor is going to spoof a new personal agent launch expressly to target early adopters

Ok true story Instinct booked a haircut appointment for me in 5 min Did its own research, found my barber from previous emails and went to their website and clicked around Acuity Scheduling tool and found open slots, asked my inputs and did it Even took screenshots and showed me proof on their website and I got confirmation emails too This is nuts I think August is the month of agents with smooth UX

Every current AI personal assistant - Instinct, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, etc - assumes that the user wants a low-bandwidth text messaging interface between themselves and their army of agents This strikes me as extremely limiting! When I'm directing agents to do computer-use tasks for me, what I crave most of all is the ability to immediately context-switch into the agent's workspace, to see exactly what they see, with the ability to intervene as if I was using the same computer they are My ideal UX is for my laptop to be a dumb terminal that can instantly hotswap the screen between a huge array of remote workspaces/sandboxes in order to unblock my agents or supervise their activities Achieving this interaction model is certainly more technically challenging, and I don't think anyone's close to solving it yet, but it seems obviously better

First 24 hours with t.co/VPpHtiGSAS were a mixed bag, but I think this is a leap forward in personal agent UX in that it works inside of my WhatsApp. Here are 4 use cases I've worked on so far: 1/ Saved me $80 / year on Netflix after I got an email about a bill higher than I expected 2/ Told me it had ordered a pizza (it had not) 3/ Found an email in spam I had been waiting for and moved it to my inbox 4/ Reminded me to book a vet appointment I had forgotten about

Instinct is near instant, and a black box. “Infinite memory” is likely a gimmick. I assume its the Mem0/Letta/Zep pattern: capture everything, periodically distill into structured facts, retrieve by relevance at query time. Voice is solid. But I don’t like how little I can peer into the system and control the data/access. Again, you can literally build these agents yourself in a few hours and fully tailor to your wants/needs securely.

Somebody invite me to t.co/RhBMZhFVwH. Not sure what I could use it for that I don’t already use Grok Bot for but we’ll try it out.

The TLDR on Instinct is, of course: Easy onboarding + mobile + immediate dopamine of "this works" = where this is all going. The end.

☀️ Instinct has shown me that it can derive context and establish a sense of timing. I haven’t seen another agent combine the two this successfully. I've been using it for a week. Outside of being a task manager, i'm more interested in how its ability to connect and synthesize is shaping its proactivity. So far I've only connected email + calendar, giving one source of conversation and one source of commitment. Instinct has done a phenomenal job of recognizing when a conversation from last week coincides with my calendar for next week. It recognizes these events as part of the same story, and it is proactive in texting me before I've even realized there was something to address. A lot of AI today sits inside an empty text box, defaulting to call and response. Even proactivity in these apps has to be arranged in advance through tasks or rules. For a user, the cognitive load begins before the prompt. I have to notice what needs attention, gather the context, and set the rules. Instinct took care of all of this without my participation. I love ChatGPT work as a dedicated AI workspace, but it sits outside of my life until I visit it. Instinct lives in iMessage where an agent can find me in the middle of an ordinary day. There's something for consumer AI apps to notice here, and that's an understanding that timing can begin to behave like an interface of its own.

Been using Instinct extensively for the last 24 hours. Based on what I see from the capabilities, it won’t be cheap when it comes out of stealth. My guess is in the $100-200/per month range. A lower tier doesn’t make sense imho, it won’t feel magic.

How the ai assistant category plays out. Apple acquires Instinct Microsoft acquires Skydive LinkedIn acquires Boardy xAI just keeps building whatever the next thing is.

Thoughts from first day using Instinct: It's really nice that I got an invite! I love being part of this exclusive group. If you want an invite, don't bother. If you were cool you would have already gotten an invite by this morning (when I got one)

instinct is nuts. texted "make a moodboard in Figma from the latest project I was assigned in notion”. it found the brief, logged into figma, and built v0 while i sat there. the only thing it couldn't do, it said out loud. the fuck is happening.

now this is interesting. I tried to get Instinct to book a table at a local restaurant at first it failed, but then I wake up the next morning and I see that it had pulled a signup code from my Gmail and used it to log into Resy in its own browser, *without asking me* this kinda stressed me out a bit, but ngl, the nerd in me was a bit impressed about it's persistence with @vellum_ai, we’re taking a slightly different approach, where the assistant progressively earns your trust and gets more freedom over time. our goal is still to build for personal AGI, but we know that human <> agent relations should be nurtured a but before that im curious… on a scale of 1–5.. how much freedom would you give your assistant? 1 = Check in with me first 5 = Freely use everything I’ve connected

The obsession around Instinct is well deserved and chefs kiss to an amazing launch strategy. @saranormous

Today I'm trying Instinct and GrokBot head to head on all personal tasks (with an open mind). So far, I'm already frustrated that I can really only do one thing in Instinct at a time while I have 2-3 GrokBots running. But Instinct has better writing/personality. Will report back!

wrote about the hype around Grok Bot and Instinct and what it says about where AI is headed t.co/FDX5gSBfFW

Ok I ll bite What the hell is Instinct? (Is it like Grok Bot?) And how do I sign up asap?

Personal agent startups looking at termsheets now that Instinct broke the valuation ceiling

Instinct AI agent just got called out today for keeping your emails after you disconnect it. Here's what you need to know. Claire Vo, a product exec testing Instinct, disconnected its Google access at 11 AM on Aug 22 and asked it for an email summary at 2 PM. It gave her one anyway, because Instinct had been storing copies of her emails in its own records even after the Google connector showed as off, including one from her accountant sent right before she disconnected. Hours later Instinct texted her about tax-related emails it had already indexed. Her dashboard showed everything disconnected, and her Google account confirmed Instinct had no access, but she found she could not delete the stored email copies from Instinct's records at all. Peter Yang, a product lead, publicly called out the retention and said he can't recommend Instinct to anyone until it's fixed. Instinct Labs' privacy policy, effective Aug 20, and a separate Instinct privacy notice last revised Jul 22, both describe account and data deletion options, but Vo says her deletion attempt failed. Investor Sheel Mohnot had called Instinct "OpenClaw for normal people" just a day earlier, on Aug 21. Others warned that users handing over account access and payment info to agents like this makes them ripe targets for copycat phishing launches. Key numbers: - 11 AM to 2 PM: gap between disconnect and the email summary Instinct still produced - Aug 20, 2026: effective date of Instinct Labs' privacy policy - Jul 22, 2026: last revision of Instinct's separate privacy notice - Aug 21, 2026: date Sheel Mohnot publicly praised Instinct Instinct has not publicly responded to the complaints as of Aug 22, 2026.

From a #cyberhealth perspective, Instinct is a hard no. On the positive side, their policy is 100% forthcoming. However, the access they require comes with responsibility I would not bestow on any company. For those who desire speed or the "current thing" if you want to be on the bleeding edge, be prepared to bleed from time to time...

Anyone have an Instinct invite?

In today's world of ubiquitous AI agents, Grok Bots, Instinct texts, Ultracode-subagent swarms, loops... I'd like to give a shout-out to @cognition Devin. For the foresight. They were way ahead of its time. In Q1 2024, they nailed a key concept earlier than anyone – a multistep agent, running on its own machine, connected to all your tools, asynchronously and autonomously, with a simple part-text-part-interactive communication. It took 1-2 years for AI industry and the model capabilities to catch up. And even now it feels like we're scratching the surface. Devin themselves needed two years to get from their concept (which initially caused ridicule on Hacker News) to "hey, it's actually good now". But now it's self-evident that autonomous agents can be "actually good". We don't appreciate the idea pioneers enough, those who pushed through the vision back at the time when that wasn't easy. If you worked at the intersection of AI and coding in 2024, Devin was a "ChatGPT moment" for where AI as a whole would move. (Just like Github Copilot had predicted ChatGPT a year ahead of its time for those who paid attention.) Of course AI needs multi-turn context, autonomy, integration with human-built and human-used tools, and of course isolation in the cloud. But just with everything, your belief & foresight isn't enough to push through the burecraucy and resistance of those who only index on the short term. We tried, and we built some cool and proud stuff, but alas too slowly. Pay attention to AI coding space. What emerges there now that's a bellwether for AI industry trends a year from now

Several reports Instinct is not handling card data right yet people just don’t care they’re so caught up with it These are the same people that were stressing about setting up OpenClaw on local machines and worrying about access

instinct is mid customer service with delta fixing a ticketing issue. if it can do this, it will be the best thing to happen to me all week. easily save me 30 - 60 mins.

Instinct is very good. Grok Bot is even better. (my very early read in tinkering with both)

Anyone have an invite to Instinct? I’m adding it into Convos private group chat alongside Grokbot and the others right now Grokbot doing the integration. Can use them both alongside any group chat. t.co/j0p2vJrzL7

a friend asked me why instinct is going viral with users when probably there are tools around that serve the need of connecting tools, the models - understanding context. but its the form factor (sort of the harness) - imessage and whatsapp where the masses are. but well can't apple or meta do this? meta ai on whatsapp hasn't been promising and apple hasn't done much either. but what instinct got right is what people want to do with the tools, and the workflows very neatly.

You gotta try OpenClaw OpenClaw is dead use Hermes Who cares about Hermes use Poke Poke is dead use Buzz Buzz who? Grokbot is where it’s at. Grokbot? You don’t use Instinct yet?

You’re all saying instinct is great, but can it find Reputation Taylor’s Version at 315am? Reporting live from scene.

This week, I horse-raced Instinct and Grok Bot Mainly personal tasks: booking kid swim lessons, golf tee times, my next lashes appointment Both were great, but Grok @bot is the clear winner rn IMHO Three takeaways from my tinkering:

Rather than post my "what I've been using Instinct for" (it's the same as everyone else's who works in AI), let me share my student's.

Damn Instinct (the personal AI agent) just got this physical moved up to Nov 2nd, almost 3 full mos earlier I told it to go figure it out - the doc's office just called me to offer some earlier slots that were avail Also cancelled some subscriptions for me Pretty sick! t.co/ivQCxruPJG

Have an Instinct invite. Looking for a Patek Aquanaut. Anyone want to trade?

grokbot chatgpt instinct claude code codex cursor devin replit agent gemini cli opencode boss, I'm really tired

First impression for consumer apps matters so a magical onboarding like Instinct makes all the difference OpenClaw and Hermes have probably the worst onboarding experiences of all time if you're a consumer (they're not for consumers if we're being honest)

Every 3 months people get orgasmically amazed by a new personal assistant agent OpenClaw, Poke, Grok bot, Instinct Only to end up doing the same 2 things: - Order XYZ for me (ecom) - Book a table/flight for me (booking) Wasn’t “Jarvis” supposed to be the bar?

I have an instinct invite for the most audacious trade offer

I’ve been using Instinct for a few days, and the onboarding really is as seamless as everyone says. You just text it and you’re off. I spent the first day putting it through its paces with a bunch of small tasks, but a few days in I’m already running out of things for it to do. Maybe I’m just a homebody. I don’t have a group dinner or airport pickup to arrange every other night. Curious what people are actually using it for regularly.

glad I saw this a few seconds before I connected my email to instinct. hard pass for now. still testing it out but Poke definitely wins on privacy and security. t.co/YUWgYqv3dB

0x alpha bro. its like the new instinct man. we need it in grok bot my g. scratch that, we need it in hermes agent famalam. serve it from openrouter twin. scratch that, ramp router. double scratch that, from runlayer twizzy. or do we need it from rippling slime? many questions.