This AI assistant bought me whey protein and booked a cabin for my birthday

• Instinct, an invitation-only AI assistant going viral in Silicon Valley, can handle real-world errands through text messages.
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Here’s everything that Instinct — an invitation-only AI assistant going viral among Silicon Valley tech types — has done for me over the past few days:

• Booked a cabin for my birthday and made a dinner reservation.

• Ordered whey protein from Costco.

• Faxed (faxed!) an obscure document to my bank so I could get a late-fee refund.

• Checked whether a new dentist was in-network and made an appointment.

• Dealt with a human customer service representative at my insurance company.

• Canceled several recurring subscriptions I’d forgotten about.

• Responded to my emails.

Honestly, this service is nuts. And sure, AI tools like OpenClaw, Codex, and Claude Code can already do some of these things. But what makes Instinct different is that it lives in your text messages. There’s nothing to set up, and no technical fiddling. You send it a text, and it gets to work.

VCs see the magic, too. The WSJ reported that Instinct is raising $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. Its founder, Noah Shinn, is a 23-year-old Northeastern University dropout and an early employee at AI company Sierra. Shinn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Instinct is part of Silicon Valley’s next big bet: that AI should stop telling us how to do things and just start doing them for us, something that the industry calls “agentic AI.” My colleague Hugh Langley reported that Meta is testing something similar called Hatch.

There is, naturally, a catch. An assistant cannot run your life without gaining access to a lot of it. The more hooks that you let Instinct sink into your digital life by connecting it to your email, calendar, and anything else that requires you to log in, the more useful it is. Its terms of service also allow it to train its models on user data. Shinn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

So here’s the part where I should tell you to tread with caution. Instead, I’m just going to leave you with an invitation to sign up. Write to me and tell me the craziest thing you tried.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.