Being wrong would suck but being early is a special kind of gay. We launched an iMessage agent with a unique phone number about exactly this time a year ago, and assigned our most premium users a unique 8/16gb RPi5 with Opus (eventually Fable) each to handle the backend for each of their use cases. There was never a waitlist and there was always an absurdly generous free tier (oops). This was bad unit economics on our part, but a full year later, ~93% of those users still use their Shuffle agent today. This service has long been available, between us and a handful of other services, over the last ~14 months. But unlike Instinct, my dad is not the head of silicon at SpaceX, and we weren't able to raise $350M on Shuffle as a beta-waitlist product barely scratching profitability. Thankfully, iMessage agents still haven't cracked 99% of the tam, ie the vast majority of Americans have no idea that AI can be connected to iMessage, and they're all still there for the taking.

everyone is wondering why Instinct is different from the horde of other AI assistants after using it for a few days, I think their pmf comes from nailing 5 key UX decisions: - reliable background browser infra that can be spun up via fire-and-forget SMS - frequent cron jobs that make it feel proactive and “always on” - tone of voice that feels very human - iMessage blue bubbles that make it feel like you’re really talking to a human - emoji reactions (adds delight) textbook example of how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

The consumer agent just started to feel real. I told Instinct: “You know that thing we did? Move it back 90 minutes.” It remembered the booking, the pub’s website, changed the reservation and sent me the confirmation. Most businesses are not ready. t.co/B7glREWkI9

instinct is booking you restaurant reservations. instinct is sending me an hourly digest of every pre-1960s acoustic guitar that comes into the big dealers' inventory and the delta in price against historical averages. we are not the same.

Instinct is not free. They may not charge you directly, but I’ve spent $1000+ I wouldn’t have otherwise

Personal AI assistant startup Instinct closed a $250M round at a $2.5B valuation to scale compute & enterprise distribution against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google t.co/kwS7WS8Rmg

In Instinct, we get our "Uber" of the AI era. Light a bunch of money on fire at subsidized rates to build a new consumer habit that becomes impossible to dislodge. The question: what's the network effect being built? Hypothesis: it's memory depth per user. t.co/saaEcDyHn9

John: It's difficult to know if people will ultimately want agents to speak as them, or just communicate on their behalf as separate entities. "In the short term, is it better to have a product like Instinct, where it has your email, iMessage, etc.?" "Or is it actually going to be more likely that people will want to have a degree of separation from their AIs?" "They can say, 'I have an assistant that has its own phone and email, and if I want to share an email, I'll forward my email to the agent.'" "'Or maybe it has read-only access to my email. But if it's going to go book me a reservation, I want it to call from its phone number and identify itself as someone else.'" @johncoogan

What percentage of the tweets by VCs about instinct will be deleted in 6 months? Someone should make a site or Twitter bot that tracks this publicly.

Interesting observation that when I was on Reta for a cut (April-July) my impulse shopping dropped drastically while now that I’ve been bulking on a much lower dose over the last month my rate of unnecessary purchases have radically spiked. Asked instinct to tabulate my Amazon receipts as a rough proxy

3 reasons why Instinct is worth the hype: 1. Can log in using google to any apps like linkedin, notion etc. for me. - the best browser experience 2. Can process many parallel tasks at the same time and know which prompt is to which 3. Great memory system- differentiate between task level, preference level, user level

More from the last 24 hours with Instinct: - read a portuguese tax slip I didn't understand and walked me to paying it in 5 minutes - restocked my supplements, found my saved card was dead, switched cards - prepped both kids' school years: read the school emails, put the parents' meetings on my calendar, signed me up for the new school portal - postponed a medical exam & sent my doctor a prescription refill request - caught a parcel pickup deadline and put it on my calendar for the last possible day, chained to a meeting nearby right now it's the best consumer agent i have tested

I do not understand the hype for Instinct. Tried it, it’s good. So is Grok bot, Hermes, OpenClaw, etc and slightly different in their super powers/positioning is all. You use what you need/like. What outcomes surprised you that were otherwise hard to achieve?

Instinct in India is completely nerfed, can’t make payments or anything. So it just feels like poke to me. It did manage to do a web checkin for me tho, which is interesting. Can’t : book movie tickets, order food, or any other transaction usecase. So I am not sure it will be able to handle hotel bookings with a cover charge either. Seeing the instinct hype I feel poke probably had too early an acquisition and couldn’t fully explore its true potential.

i paid $0.99 / mo for poke. instinct feels 10x better as a personal productivity agent, and i'd pay $10 / month for it. but not a magnitude higher because 1. it's not enabling access to a novel experience 2. solving things that i didn't have to do or somewhat necessary but dreaded doing and therefore associated with negative feeling/chores. for reference i pay $20 for open (meditation app) and $300 for equinox.

Saw it yday and was sold out. Asked instinct to help me get one. It monitored and found it a day earlier. Ordered via @link payment! Nice work @jeff_weinstein @jay_ssh and team! secured! t.co/OJmdqxq8GA

Ok this will sound like a hyperbole post but it’s not I have been using Instinct, the new AI assistant and it just found me ~$700/yr in subscriptions I forgot I was paying for. Real things it did: • Audited my Gmail and mapped every recurring subscription: ~$290/mo I wasn’t fully tracking • Found a “Universal TV Remote” app billing me $5.99 PER WEEK. That’s $311/yr for a remote app. Killed • Cancelled my AARP auto-renewal end to end: logged in, navigated the account, verified the confirmation screen • Flagged that my AAA membership ($121/yr) was duplicative because Geico already covers roadside. Cancelled that auto-renewal too • Caught a domain auto-renewing for $76 the next day and turned it off in Namecheap the night before • Found Suno at $30/mo I barely used. Downgraded to $10 • Sends me my kid’s school lunch menu every night at 7pm without me asking • Told me my car needed an emissions test before tag renewal, and that the deadline falls on my birthday. Saved a wasted trip • Built and deployed a tic tac toe game to my Netlify in ~10 min • Deployed a directory of 46 personal site previews to my Netlify • Designed 4 creative directions for my sister’s film studio site, then built the full site on the winner • Pulled my Netlify team ID from my personal account when I needed it Total: ~$700/yr in zombie subscriptions gone, plus a few hours of errands I never did. The underrated part isn’t the doing. It’s that it noticed things and proactively suggested what to do. Plus the UX was chef’s kiss This is about instinct. co, the app that’s all the rage on X lately Not a sponsored post nor am I an investor just a fan and early user

Who can give me an instinct invite?

I've asked instinct to do three projects so far and it's accomplished all of them. I'm pretty impressed. From openclaw/hermes it feels roughly like going from Cline to Claude Code t.co/PIwMIoyj5H

poke/instinct will go the clubhouse way for very similar reasons or breakout into spotify space investors should speak to @usefaff and what they've learnt

Instinct vs. 100 specialized apps trying to be the go-to agent for different actions

ok, another Instinct invite batch. refresh! (try to buy something and give us @link feedback!) t.co/YZalIbKJev

the last 5 things i asked instinct to do where all purchases: replace broken things in my apartment, 70mm odyssey tickets, even buying and setting up software. i never thought i’d need an ai to help me spend money faster but here we are

Gonna start a thread of things Instinct has done for me:

New Blog Post - Instinct. The hottest new agentic play. My views on why they are winning (edge use cases, and SMS as authenticated channel). t.co/uuuVyuxhXi

Today in Instinct: - Checked-in and bought seats for an upcoming flight without filling forms or visiting the airline's website - Approved a bunch of people that were on the waiting list for an upcoming event - Asked if Netlify analytics is free. Said no, suggested a free alternative. Created the account and set it all up - Completed the migration of one of our sites from one hosting provider to another one, making sure DNS were correct, etc. Once done, cancelled the paid plan with the original provider In all of the above, I never had to leave iMessage. Massive kudos to @noahrshinn and the rest of the team. Mind blowing stuff. I've been playing quite a bit with Grok Bot too, but the experience with Instinct feels more seamless so far. While Grok Bot sometimes asks me to take over the built-in browser/computer for different things, Instinct very very rarely does. And I know a lot of this was somewhat possible with OpenClaw and Hermes, but the headache of setting them up and managing if not worth it for normal users.

Tim Cook will go down at one of the GOATs. Siri and voice to text are still mostly terrible (honestly unusable) BUT… The more time I spend in AI, the more I think Apple is going to be the big winner. If (and when) intelligence commoditizes… it’s wild to look at what Apple already owns: Distribution: 2B+ active devices Compute: Distributed network of Mac / Mac mini Personal computer: iPhone Silicon: Apple Silicon Identity: Apple Account Private context: messages, photos, mail, calendar, location OS: iOS / macOS Payments: Apple Pay / Wallet Sensors: Watch / AirPods Interface: Siri Agent interface: iMessage And If agents become something you message instead of software you open, messaging becomes the new command line… you are seeing this with apps like Instinct and others. iMessage can become the new agent interface, the front end to the internet. Apples owns the device, identity, context, permissions, compute, payments and interface through which intelligence can actually do things. Everyone else is spending hundreds of billions trying to own intelligence… while Apple “sits on the sidelines” betting that intelligence becomes abundant, while context / distribution / execution remain the scarce moat.

Trust your Instinct is a billion dollar tagline

If both @usemonologue or @WisprFlow had a standalone Dictate action in Shortcuts, they could be the front-end voice model for Instinct. Apple’s App Intents APIs for Siri AI are best when they allow cross-app interaction. It’s important to go beyond ingesting into your own platform and make actions designed as part of the user’s toolbox. That’s where boundless opportunity lies with Siri AI – in the remixing.

Episode 276: Coder Cloud We introduce Coder Cloud, a simple website where you can hire any number of Coder agents at $1/hour each. Connect any GitHub repo, spin up any number of Coders, go for a walk and come back to merged code. We use Coder to build Coder and we're excited for you to use Coder too! Live now in private beta. Invite codes available on request, starting with our friends and community members. Sign up at t.co/SUMAIjE35e We truly appreciate all feedback and feature requests! Transcript: Folks apparently as a business you're supposed to put out a product that people want to pay you money for. So I guess we'll try that. This is Coder Cloud. The magic of Coder, state-of-the-art coding agent, accessible on web, mobile, desktop. Dollar an hour. How you like that? Dollar an hour. Let's see. Yeah, dollar an hour. Spin up any number of them, asterisk: subject to our infrastructure not collapsing. I've been running multiple of them happily. I'm going to try to ramp that up to 10 to 15ish. You'll see me post some fun stuff. Subject to availability, infinity Coders: a dollar an hour. How many can you do? This is going to sync up with our TUI we've already released — that part's open source — and our mobile app. We're going to do it Instinct-style: private beta, DM for invite code. We're able to price aggressively because let's just say that the labs have major skill issues when it comes to agents. And we're going to knock them on their ass. Okay, coder dot openagents dot com. See you soon.

Let me know if you need an invite for Instinct. t.co/bksZCN2nLf

Personal agents are exciting. I skipped the OpenClaw craze because I did not have the mental bandwidth to figure it out. I signed up for a less-effective text message agent and it wasn’t bad (just very limited in what it could do) but I can tell Instinct is gonna be a killer. I have tried it for one thing, which is canceling a local meal prep service that we occasionally use. It logged into the site flawlessly and even sent me a screenshot when it was completed. My next hurdle to overcome is scheduling a derm appointment—I think Instinct would need to be able to make a call, not sure if that is a thing yet.

Honestly, I hadn’t felt FOMO in weeks, but then I saw @jaimenovoa talking about Instinct (built by @noahrshinn and his team), and after using it for a while… it kind of blew my mind. I use it straight from WhatsApp and, while some things (e.g. connectors) are easier on desktop, it’s a REALLY good assistant. And actually i've asked my ex wife to use it, it is that good

The problem with apps like instinct is that I just don't have enough going on in life that can be automated with such a thing. Believe me, I thought about it a lot back when openclaw and friends went viral... I just cannot come up with enough use for it to be worth it.

instinct ghosted me after 1 week of me using it I've never been ghosted by an agent tbh

Nell (The open source alternative to Instinct) is live on Product Hunt today. Please Upvote and share feedback: t.co/5JjpHjIV48 Same job. A personal AI agent you text/call to get things done. Book the table. Buy the tickets. Cancel the subscription. Watch for the drop. It already does ~80% of what Instinct can do, but the data stays yours. Your keys, your accounts, your context - nothing leaves your machine unless you say so. Anything that spends money, sends a message, or touches a credential waits for your explicit yes. That gate is enforced in code, not by hoping the model behaves. Secrets are encrypted before they touch the database and never reach the model. Self-hosted. Whatsapp/Telegram/iMessage. Model agnostic: Claude today, GPT tomorrow, whatever ships next. If you wanted a personal agent without handing a company your whole life, this is it.

Grok Bot can book and make payments now. People really believe in agentic booking, and a lot of people already use ChatGPT and stuff like that for recommendations. But can a bot actually replace discovery too? Amazon for goods. Instagram for basically everything. Can agents replace those flows? Or is there a way to meld the two? That's what @join_pearl is trying to do. Luxury travel discovery with social proof + booking. I find it potentially dubious that you can have it all in one place with products like Instinct, Grok Bot, or ChatGPT. People will always want some level of social proof beyond what a bot is telling them. Can a bot really tell you what you want? Or is it better at booking once you've already figured that out somewhere else?

PANews Weekly Funding Report | Aug. 24–30 AI and robotics remained red-hot in the private markets last week, with capital flowing primarily into AI applications, security and AI agent infrastructure, as well as embodied AI and robotics foundation models. Personal AI assistant Instinct raised $250 million in a Series B round at a $2.5 billion valuation. Physical AI and robotics also attracted significant funding, with XPeng’s robotics unit securing more than $900 million in its first funding round at a post-money valuation exceeding $6.3 billion. The blockchain sector recorded nine funding deals totaling more than $211 million. On-chain private equity platform t.co/FKZP8pTLff raised $14 million in a round led by Ribbit Capital, while clearing and custody firm RQD* Clearing secured $74 million in funding led by Bain Capital. Five M&A deals were also announced, including NVIDIA’s acquisition of open-source AI platform Hugging Face. Meanwhile, YZi Labs unveiled 24 early-stage projects selected for the fourth season of its EASY Residency program. #AI #Robotics #Crypto #Blockchain #Funding #VentureCapital #CryptoFunding #VC

Instinct is a well executed Hermes consumer setup.. as such perfectly commodified and there is no secret other than it working out of the box and importantly *you’re not paying for the Fable tokens* products like this benefit hugely from kingmaking + hype GTM so IMO rational t.co/KJNosQiYX4

Hi @jeff_weinstein so for some reason Instinct is not sending link as the first option. Sends a dodgy looking html ‘untitled’ that renders blank and had to prompt it to send me a Stripe Link link. Then had to login and the linking wasn’t persistent - then tried again while logged into link and said not available in your region (I’m in the UK). Hope is helpful - this would be so fun to work on!

VCs are like sheep but it makes sense: 
MANY talented people are working on personal AI agents for normal people, it's the obvious next paradigm, everyone can see it coming. Instinct team did a great job, has been the one able to attract a lot of investment, and now VCs are lining up to invest even more. Not because nobody else is working on it not because nobody else could ship something of equal quality within days,
 It’s because once you have a war chest, capital itself becomes a moat. More money in → more spend on user acquisition → more likely to win → more money wants in. It's a flywheel. Investors are totally in their right mind to try and buy a piece of this company: if they actually capture the market, the valuation is still low.

But, the sharpest investors, the shepherds ahead of the herd, are not the ones fighting for a seat at the Instinct table; they're already looking for what’s next. (hint, it’s called ginse)

looking for mentors who've hyperscaled before.
 DMs open xoxo

Most AI agents are reactive. You prompt. It answers. But sometimes, you don't ask the right question. Or you forget to ask. Or you never realized there was a question to ask. All while the AI agent sitting on your data knew exactly what needed your attention. This is why @chatbase agents now continuously monitor context across your chat logs and connected tools, proactively surface insights, recommend improvements, and take actions for you. Instead of you prompting the agent, the agent prompts you. Directly on iMessage and Slack, where you can scan a suggestion and approve it in seconds. We're excited about a new world where your company's AI agents behave less like queryable tools and more like the most effective team members you've worked with. Apps like Poke and Instinct have proved a proactive, two-way conversation on your phone is the most useful medium of interaction with your agent. Chatbase is bringing it to businesses.

Spent this weekend giving @Bot and Instinct similar personal tasks. A few takeaways: 1) Instinct is so fast. My guess is they’ve optimized small models and memory and computer use. I’ve said this before by 99% of human tasks don’t need a SOTA model. Like with humans, there are 1% problems and there is everything else. 2) instinct embellishes its work way more and seems more capable. When asked to get me hard to get tickets it will say “on it, as soon as something opens I’ll grab it” while Bot will clearly show that it’s setting up a 30 min recurring job to check for tickets. At first I thought Bot’s strategy was not as “advanced”. If Instinct is checking as soon as something opens and Bot is doing a 30-min recurring check, of course Instinct would be better at getting me a ticket. Then I asked Instinct how it know as soon as something is open? and then it revealed that it also is doing a 30-minute check. LOL. 3) I think the smaller model (speed), in the way it's tuned to just tell people, "I'm on it," makes Instinct seem like it's more capable, given the speed and the confidence that it inspires. Bot in the other hand gives you insights into how it's setting things up. It has more of a harness, which actually should inspire more confidence since you know what it's doing. That honesty also makes it seem less of a personal assistant that's just going to get a job done than a technology platform.

can anyone hook me up with an invite to instinct ai?

NEW: Instinct is raising a $250 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, for its San Francisco AI assistant.

been using Instinct for the last few weeks and there's a lot to like - fast (and successful!) browser use and automation - great secret vault UX for passwords and sensitive data - concise, clear writing style + super smart use of reactions, and just good great personality overall - proactive in suggesting new things it can do and following up on previous convos/ideas. had my AirBNB reservation cancelled and it automatically find and send me new options that's available and similarly priced once it saw the cancellation email it’s one of the first "personal agents" (maybe since @interaction) that actually feels smart ootb, not just knowledgeable. it seem to understands the world, can infer my intent on the first try, and already has most of the tools people wants built in. the last one was where Poke fell short for me the most since their "recipes" always felt convoluted and clunky. with Instinct I basically haven't needed to set up anything other than give it information and context the only downsides are 1) iMessage and WhatsApp aren’t really a thing in bkk, so the bot gets buried under marketing/spam SMS most of the time lol 2) its data collection policy 3) wish it was multiplayer so i could use it with my family

iMessage based agent products will always fail. it is extremely obvious why. This goes for instinct, poke, etc. It has nothing to do with product quality. they are great products!

My behavior also reflects this. Have heard countless stories of flights, hotels, retail, and even 7-figure wires being done on Instinct. Turns out, an agent that makes it 100x easier to transact increases share of your wallet. & remember, today is the worst Instinct will ever be :)

Instinct just landed me the hardest ticket to buy in NYC. The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX… I’ve reached the best use case for AI

For the viral AI assistant app Instinct, is the free version is called Basic Instinct?