Rarely have I found an agent useful enough to use to solve tasks that were impossible for me. Discard my old motorcycle, for example, which has two fingers of dust and hasn’t been used since Lost Air. It is inexplicable, I know, in Lost itself. This is why instinct has been a great ally.
I find it hard to fight the method. I’m one of those people who will continue to pay the subscription just to not call support for ten minutes to fight. And that’s where instinct-like AI agents gain significant power: They can focus on tasks that seem small And that multiple ended up making a mess. As long as they don’t handle too much personal data, agents are welcome in my home.
“Instinct, I want to cancel my motorcycle”
Enrollment login is done with phone number
Sounds like an Ashton Kutcher movie, I know, but this was a practical test to find out if Instinct was for me. I set it up with a WhatsApp account on my secondary phone, also secondary. It’s not the agent I use the most, as my local Hermes is the one I trust the most, if only because Most of it is processed locally.. Still, I wanted to test the instinct.
The premise is real: I have a motorcycle that I don’t use, that I probably won’t ever use again, and for which they charge me road tax every year because I haven’t deregistered it. It’s not much, but it adds up. Since I know I’m not going to manage the recall myself, I asked Instinct:
I like how Instinct responds to messages indicating it’s working
And he started working. He explained to me how the procedure could be done and the easiest thing to do was, if I was no longer using the motorcycle, to take it to the scrapyard so that the company could deregister the vehicle. Next step: locate a nearby scrapyard that would come to my house, because I wasn’t going to push it to the scrapyard.
Instinct found three nearby scrapyards with home delivery. He gave me the cost and I decided to deduct the cost of the scrap metal from the towing service. After asking him to proceed, the agent was in charge of writing, sending and following up on emails. Total time? Less than ten minutes. I ate breakfast quietly.
He doesn’t just do the work, he follows through on it
First time contact is relatively easy for an agent who follows up alone, not so much. Instinct sent emails after my approval and has been in contact with the scrapyard to establish terms, costs and dates. Since there has been a movement on the matter It prompted me to approve the next step. And only at the end did I give him some of my information, because he needed it to move around the scrapyard.
This is just one example: agents like Instinct can take care of tedious tasks, which are a nuisance, which are only difficult because you always have to follow them. Delegation seems like a good idea to me. With caveats though: the less personal information the agents have, the less power they have to create disaster.
Each agent needs to assess the limits of access and information: they can make fatal decisions that are impossible to resolve.
Instinct is not one of the most anonymous agents that exists, since, to begin with, Mobile number required. From here, you can limit the data you manage (the more data you have, the more deterministic your behavior will be, at the cost of greater risk). If you have to handle sensitive data, it is better not to use any AI.
Anyway: I finally got the bike off my back. I consider it my duty to be less lazy with procedures.
Cover image Edited by Ivan Linares
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