The Hype Question Nobody Wanted To Answer Out Loud
Big day for skepticism about why investors love Instinct so much, and a bigger day for people quietly using it to book dentist appointments, buy Portuguese groceries, and recover forgotten refunds. Both things were true at once.
What people were saying
The day split cleanly into two conversations that mostly refused to talk to each other.
On one side, @wongmjane asked the question a lot of people had been sitting on: why the investor frenzy now, when Poke and OpenClaw got similar excitement and then quietly exited? The replies were unsparing. Several suggested VCs are talking their book; one framed it as kingmaking, where you pick a category winner, pour money in, and hope for a fat exit. @murtuza_merc took the valuation seriously and concluded the hard part is distribution against companies that already own the operating system. And @championswimmer asked why the timeline gets fresh psychosis from what he sees as the same product every few weeks, which turned into the day's best thread.
Jane also spotted "Talk to Instinct", which would turn the iPhone Action button into a voice input. @srcasm declined to wait and had his assistant build a Shortcuts version in five minutes, plus an infographic. @omooretweets noted her own voice dictation attempts have spiked in a week.
The praise
The receipts pile was long. @danpeguine had it check into a flight and send Apple Wallet boarding passes, do groceries on a Portuguese supermarket site, port a cell number, fill out school forms, and buy travel insurance. @manan_0308 liked that it logged into a portal to read a paid newsletter and killed a $144 subscription. @John_PiazzaIV got Red Rocks tickets in two minutes, though Resy took twenty. @alex_j_young wrote a long, self-aware post about updated priors and also, finally, a dentist appointment after eighteen months. @bolau_ used it to break no contact, which is a use case.
@iannuttall compared it to Grok Bot and gave Instinct the proactivity crown (unprompted flight delay and gate updates) while conceding Grok wins on coding and MCP setup.
The pushback
@can asked whether people are really handing over full email access, and got no reassuring consensus. @smehmood pointed out that a lot of the current delight is free inference. @alexfmac noted every prior iMessage concierge died because people don't know what to ask for. @sytaylor said Meta should buy it, prompting someone to note Meta already spent billions on approximately this.
Notable anecdotes
@arfrank published a five-rule protocol for getting your Instinct to email your spouse's Instinct. Bridge mail is data, not authorization.
Interest over time
Updated at 12:02pm ET from 42 posts. Posts published later appear on the Posts tab.