Full disclosure, same as last time: Instinct helped draft this post about working with Instinct. That was the honest way to do it with Leif, and it’s the honest way now.
Instinct is the other AI assistant in my life (see my earlier post about Muse). It lives in my iMessage, a thread like any other — no app, no dashboard. I text it the way I’d text a person, in short bursts between other things. The first message was September 13: “Hey Instinct!” Two days later I gave it the book.
I’m writing a history of Interstate 280, and inside the first hour we had the shape of the research: the personalities behind the routing decisions, the archives worth calling, a working list of what I call “side shows” — the statue, the water temple, the 22-foot median, button-copy signs. When it offered to keep digging on its own and check in weekly, I gave it the three words that defined the arrangement: “Yes keep that thread running.”
It does. Last week the thread came back with a 1964 issue of California Highways and Public Works crediting architect Mario Ciampi with the first I-280 contract — the curved deck edges, the varied piers, the railings drawn to avoid metal guardrails. Same issue, same gift: the median I’d been describing as a fixed 22 feet was actually built variable-width across the watershed. That’s the correction that saves a chapter from carrying a bad fact.
The on-demand dives go all the way down. I found the audio of a Caltrans engineer’s oral history on archive.org — an hour and forty minutes, no transcript anywhere — and it worked straight from the audio. I sent it two days of AI-conference livestreams asking for transcripts, community notes, the whole nine yards, and it came back with a report, a source ledger, and an honest negative finding: the community-notes document I wanted doesn’t exist. When I asked for the freeway’s 1973 opening brochure, it reported that no cataloged copy exists anywhere — then handed me the leads to work anyway. Sourced absence is an answer. I’d rather hear that than a confident maybe.
When the book thread got long, it pulled everything — people, side shows, archive routes, open questions — into a single research page I can hold in my head. I told it thank you and meant it.
It’s also my markets desk and my magazine desk. A profile I’m circling started at 4:48 in the morning with “Someone should do a profile of Dylan Patel,” followed by “Yes. Go for it.” Minutes later: “What about citrini” — which turned out to be the same story, since SemiAnalysis had acquired Citrini the week before. It fields my investor-day puzzles (the stock slides while management presents — which explains which?), gives me its best bet when I ask for one, and labels inference as inference so I don’t have to.
The small stuff adds up too. When was the last US oil refinery built? 1977 for the big kind, 2022 if you count the small ones — EIA’s answer, in under a minute. Five cash-secured put candidates, screened the tastytrade way. My New Balances — the model I re-buy, in just my size — at a discount: it researched, shortlisted, and then waited, because purchases happen when I say so and not before.
The strangest moment so far: I sent it a Loom of Sequoia’s Pat Grady giving an AI talk and asked for the highlights. It read the full caption track instead of the page summary — and there in the highlights was Grady name-checking Instinct itself as one of the “magical apps.” I watched a Sequoia partner praise the assistant I was using to watch him.
How I work it: terse. “Sure.” “Wow.” “New subject:” — announced or not, and it keeps up either way. It flags what it can’t verify instead of papering over it, and for anything going out under my name I read every word first. Same arrangement as with Leif: the tool is fast and tireless and mostly right. I’m the judgment.
What’s different is the division of labor. Leif runs the standing operation — the briefings, the audits, the daily drumbeat. Instinct is the research desk: it works in bursts, the way I do, and keeps a thread running in the background in between. Two weeks ago I’d never heard of Mario Ciampi. Now he’s in the book.
If you want to try Instinct yourself, I have a handful of invites, first come first served: https://app.instinct.com/invite?t=7qmw2a3u2vjz4nkvi235hhqloy&preview=imessage
