Meta Ships A Rival, Instinct Ships An Inbox
Meta launched Muse and half of tech Twitter immediately ran head-to-head tests. Instinct countered by giving every agent its own email address. Meanwhile someone's assistant clawed back $2,182 in unclaimed property, which is a decent day's work.
What people were saying
Today had two engines. Meta launched Muse, which meant every Instinct user with a spare hour became a benchmark lab, and Instinct shipped agent-owned email addresses, which meant everyone else spent the afternoon claiming short handles like a 2004 Gmail land rush.
@noahrshinn framed the email thing as step one toward agents owning their own accounts: booking confirmations, business inquiries, signups, all routed away from your inbox. The reaction was mostly "oh, obviously," with a side of people already speculating about a phone number next.
On the comparison front the verdicts split cleanly. @altryne gave both assistants the same Rosh Hashanah dinner ticket task; Muse booked while Instinct was reportedly still hunting the RSVP. @devahaz ran five varied tasks and had Muse ahead of both Instinct and ChatGPT Work. @KenWattana wrote the most careful teardown: Muse faster and snappier, Instinct's onboarding more premium and its proactivity better calibrated. @chowtato noted Instinct has been extremely slow all week under demand load, which is the least glamorous kind of product feedback and probably the most useful.
The praise
The anecdote of the day belongs to @mvanhorn, who had Instinct sweep every state unclaimed property database, find $2,182, and file the claims end to end, signing forms using a photo of his passport. @big_duca had it work Amazon price-match refunds without intervening once and admitted to formerly being a hater. @FundamentEdge set up his 10 and 12 year olds, who now control the hot tub by text, snipe underpriced sports cards on eBay, and order Instacart on a $100 weekly cap. @mepritijain dug forgotten vouchers out of her mailbox.
The pushback
The day's biggest post was skeptical: @taylorotwell argued personal assistants are a solution looking for a problem, because most people's lives are not complex enough to need agentic orchestration. @NegativeAlp went further and predicted the whole thing is dead in six months. @Appyg99 is spending the weekend moving 2FA off email, on the theory that an agent with inbox access plus a breach is a bad combination. @HarryStebbings offered the venture framing: thin wrapper today, deep product later, and the open question is execution speed.
Interest over time
Updated at 1:01pm ET from 111 posts. Posts published later appear on the Posts tab.