The new moats are the same as the old moats Every few years, we fall in love with shiny new tech and forget the basic physics of consumer software. We’re doing it again with AI. The new moats aren't new at all. They're the exact same as the old moats: network effects, marketplaces, and platforms. Right now, consumer AI is booming. New agents like Instinct, Bot, and Tomo are dropping mind-blowing experiences. The underlying tech is incredible, but almost every product being built today shares the exact same challenge: They are completely single-player. Single-player products are 100% tied to value - and in this case mostly agent : model performance. If a competitor drops an agent tomorrow that books travel faster, tracks habits better, or handles life admin more reliably, everyone can switch overnight because leaving is easy and has nearly zero friction. Especially when it is so easy to onboard with just a new message. The legendary consumer tech giants didn't win because their underlying technology stayed marginally better forever. They won because of structural lock-in: Social Networks: You don't abandon WhatsApp for a prettier UI if your friends aren't there. Marketplaces: Airbnb, Doordash, and Uber hold supply and demand in a tight loop. Platforms: Apple and Android deliver you a complete device so you take advantage of the software on top of it (though this creates opportunities too) Novelty gets you initial distribution. Multi-user dynamics give you long-term retention. If your consumer AI product doesn't become exponentially more valuable to User A when User B joins, you don't have a moat, just a temporarily superior feature set. We are seeing this in the coding agents as people jump from tool to tool based on the best performance. But… all is not lost. There are huge opportunities here. Agents will get better when more of our friends are on them and can help us coordinate and communicate to do more together. Agents that help us improve and strengthen our habits can get better as we add friends and hold each other accountable. Data flywheels are great, but social and marketplace flywheels are what actually build enduring tech giants. It’s time to stop building isolated AI tools and start building the platforms where people connect, transact, and coordinate together.

Instinct is painfully slow, so we built the world's best iMessage agent. Introducing Companion > gpt-6 astra by default > bring your ChatGPT account (inherits context) > 1000+ plugins from marketplace > isolated computer with MCPs + CLIs t.co/q3HMmd6jJ0

Was reluctant to try Instinct but my goodness... it set up Quickbooks for an LLC, pulled in all invoices from earlier this year from inbox, set up new AmEx account for expenses and also set up Expensify in under 20 minutes. Loved my first week with grok bot but it slowed tremendously. Also loving the text experience vs multiple chats. The future is looking a little wild folks!

lets review what happened this weekend: - jensen said "AGI has arrived" + 400k more GPUs coming online - entire timeline is agi-pilled on astra, instinct, and grok bot - korea pumped 4.6% yesterday and another 2% right now. double pump loop - berkshire hathaway is deploying cash into the ai trade - trump says gas goes below $2 after the US wins the war prepare yourself for the mother of all pumps tomorrow

The hottest category in tech right now is AI assistants. The question is; who is going to win? Instinct raised at $2.5BN. Has Benchmark and Index behind them. Grok Bot is ripping with Elon and has the distribution machine of X. And then there is Town, one of the only ones that’s actually making real money from real businesses. Don’t write Zuck off. This will be his next play and integrated into every WhatsApp user’s product. I sat down with Town Founder, @jgreze to understand WTF is going on, who wins and who loses? Condensed my notes below! 1. We Have Passed the Point Where Humans Look at Lines of Code Software engineering has crossed a threshold where machines increasingly write and ship code into production under model-based guardrails. Outside critical security controls, humans will spend far less time reviewing raw code. The future belongs to systems that manage autonomous AI agents writing software, running tests, and validating their own work. 2. You Can Build at the Speed of Machines, but You Can Only Learn at the Speed of Humans AI development tools allow competitors to clone features in weeks, erasing traditional software head starts. But deep user feedback cannot be automated. While machines accelerate execution, true competitive advantage comes from maximizing human learning cycles and understanding customers faster than anyone else. 3. Why None of the AI Assistants Have True Product-Market Fit Today Despite immense market hype, no current AI assistant has achieved deep product-market fit with mainstream users. Most products still cater primarily to power users rather than everyday workers. Before worrying about moats, founders need to create frictionless experiences that resonate with the mass market. 4. Network Effects at the Agent Level Will Separate AI Winners Sustainable moats in AI assistants will come from multi-user network effects at the agent level, not single-player productivity. When autonomous assistants collaborate across teams to resolve queries and execute work, switching becomes increasingly difficult. Multiplayer workflows create organizational lock-in that personal assistants cannot replicate. 5. How Much of the Workload Stays at the Frontier Versus Open Weight? AI application margins depend heavily on how much work requires expensive frontier models versus cheaper open weights. Complex reasoning may still demand frontier intelligence, while routine tasks like scheduling and email tagging continue moving down the cost curve. Shifting 80% of workloads to open weights over time could create far more sustainable economics. 6. My R&D Is Just Spent Getting Product Parity With the Giants Competing with giants like OpenAI requires massive investment simply to maintain feature parity. Startups cannot rely on unique distribution if their underlying harness falls behind on core capabilities. AI assistants must invest heavily to match the execution speed and product depth of frontier teams. 7. Why Instinct Is Not a Competitor to Town Consumer assistants like Instinct focus on rapid acquisition through subsidized personal tools, while enterprise platforms build monetizable team workflows. Although their technical harnesses may overlap, their target ICPs and business models diverge sharply. Enterprise agents monetize by embedding collaboration directly into daily operations. (links below)

You are all sharing your location with Instinct, while Instinct is sharing its location with me t.co/7XZ5CQgYUf

Okay I’ll bite! Instinct is pretty magical. I booked a train ticket on IRCTC and got it cancelled in just a few clicks. It handled everything from authentication, live status, captcha, QR code generation and booking, all from within WhatsApp.

Instinct is pretty amazing for me for several reasons: 1. I've always had trouble with admins, mostly because I don't like asking people for things. I don't mind delegating things to people for the good of the company, but I definitely have a hang-up when it feels like it's serving me. Have no such issues with AI. 2. I like communicating through text for this type of stuff. It's really nice to be waiting for 30 minutes for some kid thing and just text to bang out some quick responses, scheduling and email. I like there is very little context switching between apps. Everytime I actually go into slack, gmail, notion, I get too distracted by all the things and get thown off course. 3. Sick of the verbosity of most of my other AI interactions. It's not this; it's that. long paragraphs to get through without much info. For some things that's good, for admin stuff it's annoying. Instinct is super succint and I love that. 4. It's quite good at what I need it for. Scheduling, travel, reservations, email/slack responses waiting on me, reminders, coordinating with kids/family, etc. So far, A+ experience. My biggest worry is the freeness of it -- how much are they going to charge me for this???

instinct is all the rage right now. but the interesting part is less the AI concierge category, and more the product design. there is no interface. you send a voice note, and realize how much richer voice is than search. we don’t speak in keywords. we ramble, add caveats + change our mind halfway through. that mess is context. what really clicks is the read receipts. the immediate reply. the reaction. you feel heard. we spend so much time talking about capability in consumer AI, but repeat behavior is driven by emotion. instinct feels good to use. it makes you feel seen, heard understood. like there’s actually someone at the other than end. trust + memory are the next problems to tackle. a real concierge knows me over time. and trust gets much harder once the agent can actually act. we are getting good at making the interface disappear. now we have to build the relationship underneath it.

So far instinct has: - Booked me tickets to the odyssey in 70mm imax at the lincoln square amc in nyc - Paid off a speeding ticket I got in switzerland in 2024 that I never got around to (after trying to negotiate down late fees) - Booked me a dentist appointment after finding a groupon for a dental cleaning and full checkup for $54 (I just pay out of pocket bc dental insurance is a scam these days) - bought a gift for a friend’s wedding I won’t be able to attend. - cancelled two subscriptions that have been billing monthly on my card but were made on email I no longer have access to. For one of them, it went back and forth wirh a customer agent that was also completely AI (both agents were responding immediately with essays of texts) until it finally wore the other agent down First AI tool that was so easy to setup that I think I could easily onboard my parents (wayyy simpler than hermes and openclaw which I think are now cooked for consumer and will be reserved for power users). Oh and thanks to subsidies instinct is completely free with no apparent usage limits. Now to see instinct become obsolete in a month when some astra agent that does tasks instantly replaces it and I have to start building context and connecting passwords from scratch again

Instinct is getting banned in India. Pakka t.co/5rf2AM48mH

If you had asked me what was “working” in AI x commerce a month ago, I would have said ChatGPT If you ask me now, I would say Instinct Why have other attempts to transform shopping with AI not worked? There’s two categories of purchases: (1) things you have to buy; and (2) things you want to buy For category (1) - the way to win is having the most inventory, best prices, and easiest conversion to purchase. This is why Amazon is the largest retailer in the world! Products like Instinct and ChatGPT can tap the entire Internet for inventory via real time browser use. I’ve started to build a behavior of defaulting to them for everything. More verticalized AI commerce products have to catch or acquire you at the right time for the right purchase, and likely have pre-scraped, limited inventory. Instinct in particular is strong here because they make it very easy to purchase once you’ve saved down credentials. For category (2) - items you want to buy (clothes, beauty, furniture, travel) - most attempts have been about making the purchase process faster. This is often (IMO) a mistake. For these purchases, the process of sifting through options is part of the fun! Not effort to be abstracted away. So far, products like ChatGPT and Instinct also have an edge here. It’s fun to ask a product with so much context on you what it thinks you would like…but conversion to purchase is still low. There should be a lot more here, but we likely haven’t seen the final form of the product that will work yet.

State of personal agents: Instinct & @bot is like giving everyone self driving vehicles but no traffic lights.

instinct is blocked from accessing my Uber, Amazon and other accounts. App systems flag it for "unusual activity" because I acess the accounts in India but Instinct's browser is in US. fair reasons to block. As JC, also pointed out, Instinct overwhelmed Resy's systems with many API calls. All of these are legit reasons to refuse services, but goes to show that the app layer systems aren't ready for agentic users/use cases yet.

decided to make an Instinct killer over the weekend Introducing Companion (t.co/GdhStHW1XZ) > Powered by GPT-6 Astra > Bring your own ChatGPT Sub > Agentic payments via Link > 1,000+ plugins via ChatGPT Marketplace > Poke personality > Supports MCPs, CLIs, File System access > Automatic persistent memory > Native browser/computer control > Cron-based scheduled tasks > Fully private and no data retention

I connected Instinct to Retell (Voice AI) so it can make calls on behalf of me > cancelled my old energy provider + switched to a new one saving me $600/m > cancelled local gym sub that was near my old apartment Instinct can actually replace a human assistant

If true - Instinct is out for an entire segment of fintech infrastructure companies (FWIW I wouldn’t trust an AI startup with a Quickbooks or AmEx connection and neither will Intuit and AmEx) t.co/Q9P9woSkC1

Instinct or Grok Bot? I’m on Instinct who’s using Grok Bot?

I've never felt bad for AI until now. I asked Instinct to run an audit of my Amazon account to make sure all my returns have been refunded. It's currently running an audit of... ...all 20 years of my Amazon history.

Someone needs to give @superpower a $100M round stat. Using Instinct to fill out my medical paperwork, but would rather have a Superpower bot do it as it’s become the OS to my health and would help with record keeping.

Instinct is damn good as a personal concierge service. Probably kills any other such ones out there

instinct has made connectors trendy again t.co/NbdfQe6pgV

Someone got their Resy account banned this week after their AI agent hammered the site hunting for a 4 Charles table. It’s kind of sort of interesting but not in the way many think. This isn’t new. It’s just new to that person (or those people). The rules have been in place like hit a site too many times in a row and you get banned. Use tools the platform didn't approve you also get dinged. That rule is older than most of the people writing about it. I spent my early career as a network security engineer, and rate-limiting scrapers was a normal thing back then. It still is today. What's new is who's doing the hammering. Automation used to be engineers (or script kiddies) with code and scripts. Now it's normal people with agents moving 1000x faster. Every platform is about to learn its abuse defenses were built for a world where only nerds automated things. Now everyone with a @Grok @Bot, Claude, OpenAi, or Instinct account is doing it without even knowing. I asked Instinct to do something the other day around finding a new grill and after it was done asked it to give me the play by play… 166 tool calls. I would have probably been 3 as a human because I value my time. Even Google, with more infrastructure than anybody, still answers agent traffic with an "are you human" page. The biggest platforms in the world have limits too. (Attached a screen shot of Instinct hitting it during research for this post!) Agents are faster and cheaper, but more of the same. The platforms that embrace it - travel, restaurants, shopping, search, communications - win. The ones that just ban accounts will spend the next decade playing whack-a-mole with their own customers. Good luck out there.

Last week I sent Instinct a screenshot of my website with a red arrow drawn on it. See below. That was the whole brief. The change shipped to my live site a few minutes later. In the last few weeks it has also: • Rebuilt sections of my site and deployed them live. Backed up the whole thing to my own GitHub so it survives even if the tool doesn't. • Found 4 subscriptions I forgot about and cancelled them (~$300/yr back). Also caught that one "subscription" was a $29 lifetime deal, so I didn't waste a weekend hunting a phantom charge. • Screened 9 applicants for a hire for our home, scheduled the calls, sent the declines. • Dug a flight confirmation out of my inbox and now watches it for schedule changes and check-in windows. • Texts me my kid's school lunch menu every night without being asked twice. • Quoted someone else's stats in an X audit. When I called it out, it owned the mistake and fixed the analysis. The difference from the chatbots: it works in my real accounts, remembers context across weeks, and messages me when something needs attention instead of waiting for a prompt. Not a sponsored post. Just a huge fan and early user. Every one of these started as a text message or a screenshot with an arrow on it.

Instinct is the first product I’ve seen call out bot walls. Agents are starting to cast social shame

Come join the next Mixture-of-Experts event and hear from the teams at Xlue, Instinct, Humans &, Intelligence AI and Rowspace! Thusday, Sep 17 from 6-8pm

Intelligence enables an entirely new generation of experiences but we are still mostly thinking in terms of software. The best products feel like “it’s another human” you are interacting with. That’s why Instinct has taken off so well. Now imagine the same applied to everything. It’s a new experience, new stack, new everything.

Instinct is my new AI bestie

hey Instinct get me a seat on this yacht at sunset

With the pace of shipping in consumer AI and personal assistants, it's easy to forget how far we've come in terms of capability and autonomy. When chatGPT first came out it was an incredibly mind-opening moment for the general public - the biggest public exposure to LLM capability at the time. It was impressive in its conversationalness and writing, but also confident in its hallucinations and its knowledge stopped in 2021. Asking something as simple as the score to a recent game quickly outlined the gaps. Early chatGPT was magical, but the trust was not there for many, if not all tasks. Fast forward a few years and AI teammates/assistants like Grok @bot, Instinct, and others are redefining how we interact with AI systems and how autonomous they can be. Iterating on the momentum of OpenClaw and abstracting out and simplifying a lot of the core workflows, AI can do more, effectively. The biggest thing is a huge step function increase in trust. We now trust these systems to code, write, book, message, and act on behalf of us. If this is how far we've come in a few years, the next decade will be truly incredible.

Having a lot of fun adding @TownAI to group chats. It responds pretty quickly and is holding its own with my friends trying to turn it against me. Next steps is have each friend add their own townie into group chats and make them coordinate our schedules together. Does anyone know why it defaulted to Chinese? Feeling like Kimi might also be the underlying model here. I also added town to the assistant email Instinct uses and now they have shared access. Will be interesting to see how the agents interact with each other.

This! The fact instinct went first to integrate 1Password was smart. Passkeys are an authentication layer to authorize payment. All 3 payment models (visa, MC, Stripe) need to finalize a payment, but what happens when an agent has a standing signature access to authorize payments ? Who is liable? Agentic commerce needs a solution similar to how EMV shifted card shifted the liability from the issuer to the merchant. Micropayments won’t solve this.

How long till credit card networks start charging a fee for AI assistants like Instinct? t.co/TIJrxhl92Q

How does everyone approach security with stuff like Instinct/Grok Bot?

I told instinct to order a pizza and it took an hour just for making the order. so we built the world’s best iMessage assistant powered by gpt-6 astra Introducing Companion > connect it to your ChatGPT account > 1000+ integrations via marketplace > isolated computer with MCPs + CLIs

Chat with GrokBot over iMessage. I built a Mac app that delivers the "Instinct experience" with @bot (free w/ @cursor_ai subscription). MacBot is is a fully local, private macOS menu bar app. DM if you wanna try! @mntruell @elonmusk

Seriously blown away by all what instinct can do. It's what OpenClaw should have been.

Who has the full breakdown on Instinct vs Grok bot vs Pally?

I agree on this! Instinct has understood my personal needs better and Grokbot seems to be better for work, although CUTS uses Claude Cowork right now. t.co/JwOnlmibxS

folks who’ve tried instinct, what are your top use cases, and how has it been so far? is it actually worth it?

instinct is saving me a bunch of money already. fun.

Instinct, a freshman AI assistant that has Silicon Valley buzzing, can book and rebook trips from a text thread. It has become the latest “it” thing in Silicon Valley by building a text message-based AI agent that can execute tasks with surprisingly little friction, including booking and rebooking travel.  Key lesson for travel: Talking about frictionless booking isn't the same as delivering it.

Seeking an invite for Instinct. Please DM if you have one. Coffee on me.

Instinct has me thinking about how great it was when TSA Precheck rolled out and few had it. Ubiquitous agents will soon spoil the fun.

instinct has nailed the onboarding

If you are one of those skeptics hesitating to hand our your payment creds to an agent (Instinct, Grok bot etc) then try selling. I have asked them to list all my unused items and monitor the inbox. I asked it to negotiate hard but sell items when they meet my floor price. (1/3)

I have a thing for ai personal assistants Instinct I’m currently obsessing over you and how you speak to me and do things for me

We don’t need resy for agents. We’re getting this wrong: Just tell your instinct or @bot to study a restaurant, read the biography of the chef. Then deliver the ingredients home and let the Microduck from @pollenrobotics cook that meal for you. Give it a few years and somebody will rent nice spaces for you to enjoy your dinner self served by your bots and humanoids.

i just asked instinct to give me all the yc startups that are hiring storytellers and video editors felt great to see fueler link on #1 my plan is to bring other yc startups on fueler (p.s: lmk if you want to work with cardboard, great team building something ambitious )

Can someone here help me with Instinct invite?

who has done a head-to-head comparison of Instinct to Grok Bot? t.co/qtqAXooGm3

we know a lot of you are loving @vocaleo_agent x instinct, but if you're not on instinct, you can still use it we just added setup guides for @TownAI @bot @claudeai and @ChatGPT what else are we missing? t.co/FuIo71vZ0b

In the past 48 hours instinct has (without any prompting): 1. Corrected a date error in my wedding invitations. 2. Notified my friend he used the wrong number plate for his insurance renewal. 3. Helped another friend audit thousands of pounds of invoices for his business.

jan 2025: openai operator tried to doordash for me to prove agi jan 2026: openclaw tried to doordash for me to prove agi this month: grok bot tried to doordash for me to prove agi this week: instinct tried to doordash for me to prove agi hey why not just acquire doordash?

instinct is for people who aren’t already in the computer control universe with codex. codex remote can basically do what instinct does, and then some. faster too.

anyone on here has an instinct invite? wanted to try it out

instinct is just two models and a human in a trench coat t.co/koYzfTLlsr

So instinct is basically "safer" OpenClaw right? What am I missing? Since this kinda hullabaloo is a reminiscence of what openclaw used to do in its initial days lol

Instinct is painfully slow, so we built the world's best iMessage agent. Introducing Companion > gpt-6 astra by default > bring your ChatGPT account (inherits context & connectors) > 1000+ plugins from marketplace > isolated computer with MCPs, CLIs t.co/q3HMmd6jJ0

This is just going to make things harder for regular people to get above-average reservations, while Instinct users would still be unable to get any top-tier reservations. Instinct has still greatly reduced the friction between user and app interface though, efficiency and how much time can be saved has still shown to be one of the bigger drivers behind better products

love the simplicity here likely has better margins than instinct too after setup, had the agent set a reminder in 29 days to decide whether I should cancel or keep the sub. t.co/quLAa6h9TF