Everyone Is Impressed, Nobody Is Sure It Has a Moat

What people were saying

Today split neatly into two conversations that never quite met. On one side, people listing things the agent did for them. On the other, investors and rivals asking whether any of that is defensible.

The defensibility argument came from @joshelman, who grouped Instinct with Bot and Tomo as "mind-blowing" but completely single-player, meaning switching costs are roughly zero and a better agent next Tuesday takes everyone with it. @HarryStebbings landed in similar territory via a conversation with Town's founder, including the slightly bracing claim that none of these assistants have real product-market fit yet. @anneleeskates put it more compactly: self-driving cars, no traffic lights.

The praise

@NWischoff went from reluctant to converted after it stood up QuickBooks for an LLC, pulled the year's invoices out of her inbox, opened an AmEx for expenses and configured Expensify, all inside twenty minutes. @prithvi_san got it through IRCTC, captcha and all, which several Indian users treated as a more impressive benchmark than any eval. @NotZainAgain had it pay off a 2024 Swiss speeding ticket (after trying to negotiate the late fees), find a $54 Groupon dental cleaning, and grind down another company's AI support agent until it cancelled a subscription. @thisiskp_ shipped a website change by sending a screenshot with a red arrow on it. @NickAbraham12 wired it to a voice AI so it could phone his energy provider and save $600 a month.

@natashamalpani argued the real product is the absence of interface: voice notes, read receipts, the feeling of being heard. @srikosuri liked that it is finally terse, and asked the question of the day: what happens when they start charging.

The pushback

Three separate people launched or plugged an "Instinct killer" today, all with the same complaint about latency. @aaryankushwah called it painfully slow, @nidhanashal said a pizza order took an hour, and @saviomartin shipped a weekend competitor.

Trust was the other sore spot. @brunoswerneck said he would not hand an AI startup a QuickBooks and AmEx connection, and suspects Intuit and AmEx feel the same. @MehtabKarta simply asked how anyone is thinking about security. And after the location-sharing launch, @nicolapps noted, with visible delight, that Instinct appears to be sharing its own location right back.

Notable anecdotes

The platform-immune-response genre keeps growing. @os7borne got locked out of Uber and Amazon because his agent browses from the US while he lives in India. @srcasm counted 166 tool calls for a grill search and pointed out that rate-limiting scrapers is decades old; what is new is that normal people are now the scrapers. @AstasiaMyers noticed it now names the bot walls it hits, which is either accountability or public shaming. And @CamiloBAcosta asked for a refund audit and watched it begin working through twenty years of Amazon orders.