An AI assistant that lives inside iMessage just got a haircut booked in Copenhagen, a table held at a restaurant, and a Bali visa approved. All by text.
It's called Instinct AI. Invite-only, rumored to be raising at a $10 billion valuation, and blowing up on X.
Greg Isenberg sat down with Remy (the guy behind AI with Remy, he teaches founders AI for a living) and went through Remy's raw chat history with the thing. The episode did 102K views in four days.
I watched all 27 minutes so you don't have to. Here's the walkthrough, then everything worth knowing:
What Instinct AI actually is
Instinct is a personal agent you text like a friend.
No app to install. You sign up with a phone number and it lands straight in iMessage (WhatsApp works too). Then you just ask it for stuff: book a flight, cancel a subscription, order food, find a restaurant.
Greg's one-line verdict from the episode: it feels like "the personal agent app for everyone, including your mom."
Behind the chat sits a simple web workspace. Contact methods, connectors for email, Slack and Granola, and a vault where you save logins, cards and addresses. That's the whole interface.
There are no MCP servers to wire up and no command line anywhere. That's the point, and it's why this thing is spreading beyond the AI bubble.
The onboarding is the product
Remy has set up serious agent stacks before. He once built a Hermes agent for his mom: a VPS, Docker, Composio to connect her tools. The gateway kept crashing and needed updates. His words: "Just a pain in the ass."
Instinct skips all of it. Phone number, bang, you're in. The agent opens with photo examples of what it can do, and you start delegating in under a minute.
The details are what got me.
It reacts to your messages with a thumbs up instead of replying when a reply would be noise. It uses the loud iMessage effect when something matters. It listens to voice notes. Remy sent it a GamePigeon cup pong game and it played back, and won.
Greg's read: "so human it's scary."
Most agent products fail exactly here. They win the power users, then every feature built for power users pushes the product further away from a normal person who just wants tasks off their plate. Instinct went the other way.
What Remy actually got it to do
Remy showed the real chat history on screen, friction included.
1. A haircut in Copenhagen. Remy wanted a perm. Instinct researched salons, pulled reviews, sent photos of options. When he picked one, the online booking needed a Danish phone number. The agent hit that wall, so it emailed the salon instead, and a few hours later pinged him: you're booked. Remy checked the email it sent. It read like a human wrote it.
2. A restaurant table for three. Instinct checked availability, proposed times, and booked 7:45. The restaurant wanted a card on file for the no-show hold, so the agent sent Remy a secure link to add one, then confirmed the booking and put it in his calendar.
3. A Bali visa on arrival. Remy is Australian, heading to Bali for three weeks. He sent one message asking Instinct to sort his visa. It came back with a checklist, took a photo of his passport, and asked which countries he'd visited in the last three months. Then it answered its own question: it went through his emails and Airbnb receipts and produced the list itself. Got everything right. The visa PDF arrived in the chat.
Standing at the immigration gate in Bali, Remy scanned his passport, sweating. The gate beeped and opened.
4. An Emirates Skywards account. Signed up while it worked the visa in parallel, because Skywards members get free Wi-Fi on Emirates flights. It reused his date of birth from the passport photo without asking twice.
None of these tasks is life-changing on its own. Each one saved Remy 10 to 15 minutes. Add them up across a week and you're buying back hours.
The $500 card trick you should steal
The scariest moment in any agent workflow is handing it a payment method.
Remy's move: he spun up a fresh digital card in Wise and set a $500 daily spending limit before giving Instinct the details. If the agent ever goes rogue, the worst case is capped at $500.
His phrase for it: "the blast radius would be contained."
Do this with every agent you let near money. A virtual card with a hard daily limit means you know your worst case before you start.
Where it hits a wall
Remy was upfront about the failures.
It couldn't message a Bali salon's WhatsApp account directly, so it told him to do it himself. Tasks that live inside a phone app stall it. An Indonesian checkout page beat it. And because the interface hides everything the agent is doing, it sometimes goes silent for five minutes while it works, and you sit there wondering if it broke.
Remy's fix for the silence was a mindset shift: silent means working. Give it the task, put the phone away, and it comes back 10 or 15 minutes later with the result.
Speed-wise, he rates its computer use faster than Grok bot's, which he finds slow for the same jobs. I broke down what those Grok bot agents can do in a separate post if you want the comparison.
The privacy problem is real
Now the part that should give you pause before you connect your inbox.
One user reported on X that she disconnected Instinct from her Google account at 11:00 a.m. and still got a summary of her emails at noon. So it had indexed and kept copies. Peter Yang reported the same pattern: emails retained without permission. Commenters also flagged clauses in the terms and conditions about retaining control of private data like emails.
Greg's take was honest. In an ideal world this product comes from Apple, because a startup asks for a lot of trust. But Apple isn't there yet, and this thing saves him hours a week on work he hates. So he uses it anyway, eyes open.
My advice: connect a secondary email, use the limited card, and keep anything sensitive out of the vault until the retention story gets cleared up.
Three lessons for founders
The invite-only launch worked. Remy admitted that with instant access he probably wouldn't have signed up, because X is wall-to-wall agent launches. The waitlist made getting a code feel like winning something. Greg compared it to Clubhouse in 2020, which rode the same scarcity to a valuation around $4 billion. That comparison cuts both ways: Clubhouse never lived up to it. The $10 billion question is whether Instinct does.
Network effects are back, in agent form. Instinct is rolling out a "trusted person network": you allowlist other people's Instincts, and your agent talks to their agents to coordinate plans. Founder Noah teased it on X. If they capture that early, switching costs stop being about features and start being about your people. Every founder asking "where's the moat in AI" should study this.
Simple beats powerful in the mass market. Remy's recommendation is to split the stack: Codex, Claude Code and Grok bot for business and coding work, Instinct for personal life. The same split shows up in business automations: the systems that quietly handle bookings and follow-ups win because they're reliable and simple, and a normal person can run them.
Instinct also gives every user a dedicated agent email address, so it can run booking threads without clogging your inbox. Forward it any email thread and it picks up the task from context.
FAQ
What is Instinct AI?
An invite-only personal AI agent that works through iMessage and WhatsApp. You text it tasks like booking a restaurant or filing visa paperwork, and it handles them using your connected email, saved cards and computer use in the background.
How do you get access to Instinct AI?
It's invite-only. Codes circulate on X, and existing users get a handful of invites to share. Greg and Remy were giving away seven of them to commenters on the episode. The company says the slow rollout is about compute, and Remy reads it as a marketing play too. Both can be true.
Is Instinct AI safe to use?
Open question. Multiple users reported it kept copies of their emails after they disconnected Google, and its terms include broad data-retention language. If you try it, connect a secondary inbox and pay with a virtual card that has a hard daily limit, like Remy's $500 Wise card.
How is Instinct different from Hermes agent or OpenClaw?
Same species, different audience. Hermes and OpenClaw are for power users who will happily run servers and config files, and they get more technical with every release. Instinct wraps the agent in a phone number and a chat thread so a non-technical person can use it in the first minute.
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