The Agent That Mailed A Letter Instead Of Calling

What people were saying

The day's most-liked story was gloriously analog. @mvanhorn asked Instinct to call Capital One and hand him a human; Instinct said no, then offered to mail the bank a physical letter for $3 requesting a check for $150 from a closed card. He said okay. It found some print-and-mail service he has never heard of and did it, without asking for payment details (which is either impressive or the beginning of a different kind of post).

The other big thread was @ShaneMac putting Instinct in charge of Grokbot, Muse, and Codex in a private group chat, where it told Grok Bot to stand down, told Muse to fact-check itself, and informed Codex it was in third place. By later in the evening Instinct was spinning up new agents to compete against the existing ones, including itself.

The praise

@theshre found a jacket in a shop, asked Instinct and Grok Bot to price-shop it, and saved about £90 fifteen minutes later, which prompted a genuinely interesting aside about paying agents a cut of savings. @vikas_revivo had it write a fee-reversal email to his bank for a charge too small to fight alone. @ishaanpreet auto-forwards his OTPs to it. @fnthawar published a cron stack spread across three assistants, with Instinct handling Tesla winter tire quotes, Costco gift cards loaded into an Uber wallet, and health expense submissions. @Muskanjain0401 highlighted a reverse-engineering of Instinct's memory: plain markdown files searched with grep, which is a very undramatic moat.

The pushback

@twid ran a four-agent flight bake-off (LGA/JFK to SFO/SJC, Delta One preferred) and put Instinct last: correct options, over ten minutes to answer, and a recommendation to spend $1,499 because it was "only" $149 more than the $1,152 fare. @babyfolio admitted to trusting a hyperscaler with credentials more than a startup, possibly irrationally. @shawmakesmagic called it ChatGPT for people unaware of ChatGPT, and @kirtandopamine asked why a hundredth iMessage agent is the one going viral. @credistick used the $1B-on-$10B round as Exhibit A for too much capital chasing too few legible winners.

Notable anecdotes

@AnandaniNisha had it build a resume and loop it through AI detectors until the score dropped, then noted it used her email without asking and now she gets promotional mail. And @quxiaoyin predicted an acquisition by one of the big platforms, which the replies did not buy.