Instinct: the new kid on the block

📌 TL;DR

• Instinct → I gave it a card and my travel admin. It got me into Bali, then beat me at Cup Pong.

• Cursor Projects → One AI can run a whole software build while specialist agents do the work. Useful, but only for software.

• Meta Muse → Meta put a personal assistant inside WhatsApp. Huge distribution, but its terrible interfaces still make me nervous.

• Apple’s Siri AI → Apple owns the device and people’s trust. That could be unbeatable, if Siri’s latest reboot actually works.

• n8n Assistant → Describe a reliable if-A-then-B workflow, then inspect every step. This is the kind of AI automation I want.

• Builder’s notes → I took 60 hours of course editing back in-house and cut the whole course to 3 hours 18 minutes.

Instinct is the new coolest kid on the block

Instinct is a personal-assistant agent you message on imessage like a person.

It’s basically Openclaw for regular people.

It connects to your apps and devices, then uses a phone and computer to handle real-world jobs for you.

Founder Noah Shinn says the goal is to make Instinct the best personal agent for everyone, without giving you another complicated interface to learn.

Quick note: this isn't sponsored.

I've used it every day for the last 7 days, and I'm highly, highly impressed.

I started small: I gave it a card with a spending limit and asked it to book a haircut. Then it booked 3 dinner reservations.

Then I asked it to sort my Indonesia visa and flights from Copenhagen to Bali.

When I got to the passport gate in Bali, I scanned my passport with my fingers crossed, sweating, hoping I wasn't about to get deported.

The gate opened.

The arrival card asked which countries I'd visited in the previous 3 months, so Instinct pulled the answer from the Airbnb receipts in my email.

I also tried sending Instinct the Cup Pong game in iMessage. It started versing me and won.

The launch has been very exclusive. Noah calls it an invite-only beta while the team brings more computing capacity online. waitlist or get an invite from an existing member.

From what I've seen, Instinct seeded many of its early invites through AI creators, then gave each new user another 10 invites. That seems to be how it's spreading.

The team is moving quickly too. Instinct now gets its own @instinct.com email address, so it can sign up for services and handle conversations without cluttering your inbox.

The new Trusted Person network also lets your Instinct coordinate plans with people you've approved through their Instincts.

Well done, Noah Shinn and the team. I can already see it filling the personal-assistant hole in my AI stack.

Cursor Projects puts one AI in charge of the whole build

Imagine you want to rebuild the checkout on your website or launch a new customer portal.

You give the job to one coordinator agent. It makes the plan, then spins up other agents to research the existing setup, build different parts, test them and fix problems.

The coordinator stays available while the other agents do the actual work, then brings everything back for you to review.

That’s the simple idea behind Cursor Projects.

Each Project keeps its own shared files and records what its agents learn about the product, the code and how you prefer the work to be done. Every new agent it hires can use that knowledge.

It also keeps running when your laptop is closed (on the cloud). You can tell it to watch a Slack channel and wake up when someone reports a bug, or put recurring jobs on a schedule.

I have'n’t tried it yet but would love to let this whirl on some knowledge work tasks! even though its built for devs.

You wouldn’t need to manage every agent individually. You would speak to the coordinator about the outcome, review the work it returns and step in when it needs a decision.

I think you will see Codex and Claude follow with similar products in the coming months

Its an AI personal assistant contest apparently: Meta's Muse

Meta has launched Muse, a personal AI assistant you can message through its own app or directly in WhatsApp.

It can send emails, book travel, fill out forms, make purchases and keep working after you close the app.

Muse is rolling out in the US on iOS, Android and the web. Meta says it will be free for most people, but it hasn't published the prices for heavier use yet.

It works on a separate computer in the cloud, while your passwords and payment details stay in a vault it can use without seeing them.

Muse is already inside WhatsApp, an app billions of people use. It isn't on Instagram or Facebook yet, but Meta owns both and controls how much access competing assistants get.

I haven't used Muse, so Instinct is the one I'm more excited about.

I'm reluctant to volunteer for another Meta interface. I come from an ads background, and Meta Ads Manager and the Meta Ads Library are two of the worst user experiences on the entire internet.

I've had plenty of problems with Instagram too, so Meta's track record makes me nervous.

Its distribution advantage is enormous. Meta still needs to convince me the product experience won't be fucking terrible.

Apple might have the biggest personal-assistant advantage of all

Apple has been painfully behind on AI.

Its new Siri AI promises to understand what's on your screen, find information buried across your phone and take actions between apps.

You could ask it to find a hotel confirmation in an old email, draft a reply or edit and share a set of photos.

Apple has a huge advantage here. Your iPhone already goes everywhere with you, and Siri sits inside the device with permission to use the apps, messages, emails and photos you rely on every day.

Apple also starts with years of trust that a new startup like Instinct has to earn. People already hand Apple some of their most personal information.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple acquired Instinct.

The public rollout starts on September 14, but Siri AI will still be in beta. You'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16 model or newer, and it won't be available in the EU or mainland China at launch.

These are big promises.

Apple has been trying to revamp Siri for years, and the last attempt failed miserably. I'm excited about what this could become, but I'll believe it when I see it.

n8n Assistant makes reliable automations easier to build

I'm still very bullish on n8n.

Not every repeated job in your business needs an AI agent making decisions. Plenty are predictable: when A happens, do B.

My community access is a good example.

Our CRM tracks how many months of access each person has. While they have access, the workflow lets them into the Circle community. When their access ends, it removes them.

That job doesn't need judgment. I want the same thing to happen correctly every time.

n8n Assistant makes these workflows easier to build. You describe what you want in normal language, and it creates the automation for you.

Because it lives inside n8n, it can see the workflow, help connect your accounts, test it and try to fix anything that breaks.

I like the direction. AI helps me build the workflow, and I still know exactly what will happen when it runs.

Also this week...

• Notion showed how to give different AI agents the same memory → One agent saves a personal fact to a normal Notion database, then Codex finds it there later. Notion is becoming the Switzerland of AI: a neutral place where all your agents can share the same memory, even when you switch tools.

• ChatGPT Images 2.5 landed → Sketch lets you draw a rough idea for ChatGPT to turn into an image, while Templates gives you a starting point for posters and product photos. OpenAI says the new model also follows edits better and generates images up to 50% faster.

• Grok Bot added controls for larger companies → Companies can give each employee their own locked-down computer, control which websites and tools it can access, and keep a record of what it did. Shared team bots are coming but aren't available yet.

💡 Builder's notes

I didn't get much building done this week because most of my time went into getting The AI Course ready for its official launch on 16 September.

I originally outsourced the editing. When the first few videos came back, I realised how much could still have been stripped out.

I took the editing back and went through the lot myself (60 hours of me editing by hand).

It meant I could use my own taste and judgment to decide what you need from each lesson, and what could go.

Lessons that were around 30 minutes are now 5 to 10 minutes each. The ENTIRE course runs for 3 hours and 18 minutes.

But I needed to know it worked, so I tested it at both ends.

My mum is about as non-technical as you can get, and she followed it.

Some of my smartest founder friends already use claude code every day, and they still got smacked in face with value from the modules on tools, skills, skill chains and token management.

It's one of the products I'm proudest of.

The course is a complete A-to-Z guide to AI agents. It starts from scratch, then takes you all the way to mapping each department in your company into a few key skill chains that run on schedules and handle the work for you.

AI is the integrator.

The idea I open the course with comes from Rocket Fuel: every big mission needs a visionary and an integrator.

The visionary dreams big and the integrator gets it done. Put them together and you have rocket fuel.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we now have the best integrator in the world joining our teams: AI.

Nobody needs to get fired for this to work. The goal is to give each A-player their own integrator, so they can be more productive and enjoy their work again.

The course drops on 16 September. Watch the welcome video here for a sneak peek.

🧰 Tools to try

• video-use → Drop raw footage into a folder, tell Claude Code or Codex what you want, and it cuts the footage, adds captions and overlays, then checks its own edit before giving you the final video. (free and open-source)

• Lightreel → An AI that searches TikTok and Instagram for creators, hooks, trends and competitor strategies. Use it when you're sick of doomscrolling for UGC research. ($199/month after a 3-day trial)

• dial bot → A shareable Grok Bot that calls people through Bland AI and reports back what happened. Handy for bookings and basic phone admin. (you'll need a separate Bland account and pay for the calls)

• Paper.design → Paper has become one of the tools I reach for almost every day. It’s basically Figma built for AI agents: connect Paper’s MCP to Claude (so it can see and edit your canvas), give it your project context and a few visual references, ask it for a few design directions, then keep talking through what you like until the design clicks. I’ve used it for landing pages, brand guidelines, websites, emails, social graphics and YouTube thumbnails. (sponsored)

🥣 Brain food

• How Minerva took an accounting firm from 5% to 70% margin → textbook example of the service as a software model that I love

• The Everything Store by Brad Stone → I've been reading this biography on Jeff Bezos over the last few weeks, and it is an incredible read. I've taken so many lessons from it

• AI makes copying cheaper than creating → this is potentially a dark future with AI commoditizing products