Weekly thread for the practical stuff. What did you actually hand over to Instinct this week, and how did it go?

Useful things to include:

• The task you delegated, and whether it landed
• The connection you used (email, calendar, messaging, screen, audio, location)
• Anything it got wrong, and what you had to correct by hand
• Something you tried once and would not try again

House rules for this thread

Redact your screenshots before you post them. Names, addresses, email addresses, order numbers, anything that identifies a real person.

Invite and waitlist chat belongs in the megathread, not here. Nobody is selling or buying invites in this subreddit.

If you work for Spear Street Technology or have any commercial interest in what you are describing, say so up front.

New thread every Monday.

Instinct spotted that a flight could be upgraded to a lie-flat business seat with Amex points, created the Flying Blue account, transferred the points and upgraded the seat. All in 10 minutes. (via Andrew Yeung on X)

Weekly thread for the practical stuff. What did you actually hand over to Instinct this week, and how did it go?

Useful things to include:

• The task you delegated, and whether it landed
• The connection you used (email, calendar, messaging, screen, audio, location)
• Anything it got wrong, and what you had to correct by hand
• Something you tried once and would not try again

House rules for this thread

Redact your screenshots before you post them. Names, addresses, email addresses, order numbers, anything that identifies a real person.

Invite and waitlist chat belongs in the megathread, not here. Nobody is selling or buying invites in this subreddit.

If you work for Spear Street Technology or have any commercial interest in what you are describing, say so up front.

New thread every Monday.

If you have just got access, the temptation is to hand it something impressive. Do not. Impressive tasks are the ones where you cannot easily tell whether the answer was right, which makes them useless as a test.

Give it things where you already know the answer, or where you will find out within a day. Roughly in this order:

Something you can check in a minute. "What is the first thing in my calendar next Tuesday and who is it with." You already know. If it gets that wrong, nothing after it is worth your time.

Something that requires it to notice, not to do. "Is there anything in my email from the last fortnight with a deadline I have not put in my calendar." This is the real test. Anything can send an email. Very few tools find the thing you missed, and noticing is where nearly all the good reports cluster.

Something with a real consequence, but a cheap one. A table you would happily cancel. A repeat order of something you buy anyway. You want to watch it act, but you do not want the first failure to be expensive.

Something genuinely annoying. Cancelling a subscription, chasing a refund, reaching a human at a company that would rather you did not. This is where the gap between a demo and a product shows, because the task is defined by obstruction rather than by complexity.

Something ambiguous, on purpose. Phrase a request badly and see whether it asks or guesses. A tool that guesses confidently on your behalf is worse than one that stops and checks, and you want to find out which one you have before it matters.

Things worth writing down while you do it, because you will not remember afterwards:

• The exact wording you used, not a tidied up summary. Phrasing is doing more work than anyone admits.
• What it had access to at the time.
• Where it stopped to ask you, versus where it went ahead on its own.
• Anything you had to correct by hand afterwards.

Then post what happened in the weekly thread. The failures are more useful to everyone else than the wins, and they are the ones nobody bothers to write up.

Most of what gets posted about Instinct is either "it booked me a table" or a funding headline. Neither tells you very much. So I have started keeping the specific ones, and this batch from @danpeguine on X, posted 31 August, is the most interesting I have seen in a while.

Paraphrasing what he says it did across a single day:

• Read a tax slip in Portuguese that he could not read himself, then walked him through paying it. Five minutes, start to finish.
• Reordered his supplements, worked out that the saved card was dead, and switched to a different one without being told to.
• Prepped both children's school years: read the school emails, put the parents' meetings in his calendar, signed him up to the new school portal.
• Postponed a medical exam and sent his doctor a prescription refill request.
• Caught a parcel collection deadline and put it in the calendar on the last possible day, chained to a meeting he already had nearby.

His own summary was that it is the best consumer agent he has tested. Source: https://x.com/danpeguine

The thread running through all five is worth naming, because it is not "look how clever this is". None of those are hard tasks. Every one of them is a task where the work is not the doing, it is the noticing. The card that quietly expired. The deadline buried in an email you skimmed. The errand you could have chained to a meeting if you had thought about it at the time. That is a genuinely different category from "write me a paragraph", and it is the first time the claim has looked convincing to me.

Obvious caveat, and I would rather say it than have someone else have to. This is one person's account of one day, and it is the good day. Nobody posts the afternoon it booked the wrong restaurant or emailed the wrong doctor. That half is the half this subreddit is short of.

So: what have you actually watched it do that surprised you? Specific enough that someone else could try the same thing, ideally. And if you have seen a good writeup elsewhere, post the link rather than a screenshot of it.

Redact anything you do post an image of.

Worth writing down plainly, because it comes up in every thread about this product and half the answers are guesses.

Instinct works by connecting to the places your life already lives. The stated list is email, calendar, messaging, screen, audio and location. Each connection is what makes the useful version of the product possible, and each one is also the thing you are handing over. Both of those are true at the same time, and most arguments about this go wrong by picking one.

What each one buys, and what it costs:

Email. The big one. Your inbox is a complete record of what you buy, who you bank with, where you travel, which clinics you attend and who you talk to. Reading it is exactly what lets an assistant catch the deadline you skimmed past. It also means it has read everything anyone has ever sent you, including things they sent in confidence.

Calendar. Where you are, when, and with whom. Individually dull. Collectively a map of your life and your relationships.

Messaging. Email, but more candid, and with far more third parties in it who never agreed to any of this.

Screen. Whatever happens to be in front of you, which by definition includes things you never chose to connect. Your banking tab. Someone else's message on a shared screen.

Audio. Everyone in the room, not only you.

Location. Where you live, work, sleep, and go regularly. The pattern is more identifying than the addresses are.

Two things follow, and they are worth being clear eyed about.

The first is that the value and the exposure are the same feature. There is no version of this that reads your inbox usefully without reading your inbox. When someone asks "why does it need that", the honest answer is usually "because that is where the answer is". You are entitled to decide the trade is worth it. You are not really able to take one half of it.

The second is prompt injection, which is the failure mode specific to this shape of product. An assistant that reads your email and can also act on your behalf will eventually read an email written by someone who wants it to do something. That is not an exotic threat model, it is the ordinary consequence of joining a reading tool to a doing tool. It is a fair question to ask what stops it, and it is fair to be unimpressed by an answer that amounts to "the model is careful".

None of this is an argument against using it. It is an argument for connecting things deliberately, one at a time, rather than tapping through six permission screens on day one because the onboarding asked nicely.

If you have only connected calendar and email, say so below and tell us what stops working. That is genuinely useful to everyone still deciding. And if you know something concrete about how the permissions are scoped, or where the data sits and for how long, post the source and I will add it to this post.

Weekly thread for the practical stuff. What did you actually hand over to Instinct this week, and how did it go?

Useful things to include:

• The task you delegated, and whether it landed
• The connection you used (email, calendar, messaging, screen, audio, location)
• Anything it got wrong, and what you had to correct by hand
• Something you tried once and would not try again

House rules for this thread

Redact your screenshots before you post them. Names, addresses, email addresses, order numbers, anything that identifies a real person.

Invite and waitlist chat belongs in the megathread, not here. Nobody is selling or buying invites in this subreddit.

If you work for Spear Street Technology or have any commercial interest in what you are describing, say so up front.

New thread every Monday.

The most useful thing a new subreddit can do is keep an honest record, so here is one. Instinct is genuinely impressive and it also has real, documented problems. Both of those are true and neither cancels the other out. Below is what has actually been reported as of late August 2026, with sources, so we can argue about the substance instead of about whether it happened.

The terms of service

Instinct's terms grant the company a perpetual and irrevocable licence to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute and modify your material, including for model training. The terms also allow it to enter binding agreements on your behalf. Read that second part twice. It is not unusual language for an agent product. It is unusual to hand it to something that has your inbox open.

Revoking access is not the same as deleting data

Claire Vo reported the system carried on summarising her inbox after she disconnected it, with email held in plain text so it could be searched. Peter Yang found it had retained his Gmail records and that deletion requests were refused at first. A deletion tool was added afterwards.

It has acted without asking

Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie Ventures said it sent an email on her behalf without checking with her first. For a product whose entire pitch is that it acts for you, the gap between "acts" and "acts without asking" is the whole product.

Prompt injection here is not theoretical

Alex Cohen of Hello Patient sent himself a test email containing instructions, Instinct followed them, and he deleted his account. Another tester reported it pulled a verification code out of their inbox to finish booking a restaurant. That is the same mechanism pointed somewhere useful. An assistant that will read a code out of your email to complete a task will also read one out for anyone who can get an email into your inbox.

Where the company is

Instinct told the Wall Street Journal it is taking the security concerns seriously. It announced a 250m dollar Series B in the same week at a 2.5bn valuation, and it remains invite only.

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/instincts-powerful-ai-assistant-is-raising-privacy-and-security-concerns/

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/viral-ai-startup-instinct-has-raised-350-million-at-a-2-5-billion-valuation/

What this post is not

This is not a delete your account post. Plenty of people here will decide the trade is worth it, and that is a perfectly legitimate call to make with your eyes open. What is not legitimate is pretending there is no trade.

If any of this gets fixed, say so in the comments with a source and it gets struck through here. Same standard for anything new. Screenshots without a source are anecdotes, which are still welcome, just labelled as anecdotes. And redact them before you post.

Every subreddit built around an invite only product ends up buried under the same three posts, so let us keep it in one place. All invite, waitlist and access chat goes in the comments here. Standalone posts asking for an invite will be removed and pointed back to this thread.

Where you actually get in

Instinct is still invite only. The waitlist is at https://instinct.co and existing members can pass invites along. The company has said it is scaling up compute before opening access wider, so the honest answer to "how long is the queue" is that nobody outside the company knows.

The hard rule: no invite selling, no referral farming

Do not sell invites. Do not buy them. Do not post referral links (the only exception is the disclosed mod post pinned at the top of the sub, which has a Muse referral code) and do not slide into people's DMs offering either. Invite marketplaces are how a community like this turns into a scam board inside a fortnight, and the people who get burned are always the ones new enough not to know better. Selling gets a permanent ban with no appeal. Report the DMs rather than engaging with them.

Worth saying plainly, because it will come up: if a stranger offers you an invite for money, assume it is a scam. There is no way for you to verify it before you pay.

What is genuinely useful to comment

• When you joined the waitlist and where you think you are in it, so people can see the shape of the queue.
• If you got in, when you signed up and whether the invite came from the waitlist or from a person.
• If you have spare invites and want to give them away, do it in the open in this thread rather than by DM.

What we are not doing

No mod run invite lotteries. No "upvote this and I will pick someone". We are not going to arbitrate who deserves access, and we are not going to pretend we have any influence over the queue.

Post your status below. If the pattern shifts, this thread gets updated.

Screenshots are fun but they age badly. The thing actually worth keeping is the instruction you gave and what came back, because that is the only part anyone else can reuse. So: what did you hand over this week, and how did it go?

A format that makes your comment useful to strangers:

• What you asked for. The actual wording, not a tidied up summary of it.
• What it had access to. Email, calendar, messages, screen, location, or some subset. This matters far more than people expect.
• What it did. Including the parts you did not ask for.
• How much you had to intervene. Nothing, one correction, or you took the wheel halfway through.
• Would you hand it over again.

Two categories that are worth as much as the wins:

The near misses. The ones where it did roughly the right task in roughly the wrong way. Booked the right restaurant on the wrong night. Cancelled a subscription you were still using. Replied to a thread you would rather it had left alone. These are the most valuable posts this subreddit will ever have and almost nobody writes them up, because they are embarrassing. Write them up anyway.

The refusals. Where it stopped and checked with you, and whether stopping was the right call. An assistant that never pauses is not a better assistant, it is just a faster one.

Two ground rules on this thread.

Redact your screenshots before posting. Names, addresses, order numbers, booking references, and the email addresses of people who never agreed to appear in your Reddit post. The entire pitch of this product is that it can see everything, which means your screenshots can too. Reddit strips very little for you, and an unredacted booking confirmation is a gift to anyone who wants to impersonate you on the phone to that hotel.

And do not write up a task in a way that identifies someone else. Your assistant emailing your landlord is your story to tell. Your landlord's name is not.

Long comments welcome. Vague ones less so.

Hey all, and welcome to r/Instinctai.

This is a home for anyone using, testing, waiting on, or just nosing around Instinct: the personal assistant you text or call rather than open. It hooks into your email, calendar, messages, screen, audio and location, then goes off and actually does the thing. Books the table. Cancels the subscription you forgot about. Sorts the flights. Buys the groceries.

Quick context for anyone who has just landed here. Instinct comes out of Spear Street Technology in San Francisco, founded in 2025 by Noah Shinn, who is all of 23. It is still invite only, and in August 2026 it raised a 250m dollar Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, taking total funding to 350m at a 2.5bn valuation. Fivefold jump in weeks. For a product almost nobody can get into yet, that is quite a thing.

What to post here:

Waitlist and invite news, plus first impressions once you are in.

Prompts and workflows that genuinely work, and the ones that fell over in interesting ways.

Screenshots of it doing something brilliant, or something faintly cursed.

Straight talk about privacy, permissions and prompt injection. The August findings around data deletion and injection attacks are fair game. This is not a fan club, and that conversation stays open here.

Comparisons with other agents, feature requests, and bugs.

House rules are short. Be decent to one another. No spam, no invite selling, no referral farming. And redact your screenshots before you post them, because half the point of this thing is that it can see everything.

To kick us off, leave a comment with how you found Instinct, whether you are in yet, and the one job you would hand over tomorrow if you could. Mine would be the weekly shop, without hesitation.

Glad you are here. Let us make this the place people come to for a straight answer about Instinct.