An Exceptional Product That Is Also, Apparently, Doomed

What people were saying

The day belonged to @awilkinson, who managed the rare trick of writing a rave and an obituary in the same post: exceptional product, most proactive agent he has used, also doomed, also its investors will lose all their money. The argument was the familiar one (feature, not product; OpenAI or Anthropic ships an iMessage agent and it is over; why use an assistant that lacks the memory graph you already built elsewhere). Roughly a hundred people showed up to disagree in roughly a hundred directions.

Running underneath that, a quieter and more interesting conversation from @illscience about what happens when agents are the customers: supply-constrained markets like hot restaurant tables, whether the first multiplayer pattern is agent-to-agent or agent-inside-human-chat, and how you market to something that does not have preferences so much as sponsors. @sytaylor noted that Visa, Mastercard and Ant are now drafting a "Know Your Agent" spec, which is the kind of boring infrastructure news that tends to matter later.

The pushback

@BradGroux read the terms so you would not have to, and did not like them: a privacy policy the agent itself claimed did not exist, disconnecting an integration not undoing what was already copied, opt-out training, and language letting the agent enter binding agreements with the consequences landing on you.

Separately, Meta's Muse had a very good day at Instinct's expense. @pejmanjohn named it his main agent, @SavarSareen wrote a seven-point love letter to it, @jakemintz argued a real app beats bolting onto iMessage, and @startupoppa said the lack of a native app is a ceiling. @coleywoleyyy held the other line: Instinct's model feels better than anything Muse or Grok Bot is running (his replies then speculated about Chinese models and secret humans). @hristo_vassilev asked why any of this is new when Codex exists. @0xidanlevin read the new authenticator-code support as a deliberate security-for-UX trade that only a startup is allowed to make, and possibly a moat.

Notable anecdotes

@reva_jariwala got rebooked on a nonstop with the change fee waived, versus her previous experience of United hold music. @mvanhorn was told, unprompted, about a $245 settlement credit card he never activated. @LeosReal booked plane tickets, a DMV test, and gift cards in a week. @scottfelsenthal drove five hours while it negotiated his TV bill down over live chat. @srcasm reported his agent trading founder referrals with another investor's agent, which is either the future or a new genre of spam.

Best story of the day goes to @vvkgopalan, whose agent contacted a small Belgian BnB for a cab, prompting the front desk to call his French friend about someone named Instinct claiming to be his assistant. Cab booked. Everyone else confused.