# Instinct personal agent

17 Hacker News commenters recommended Instinct personal agent and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Instinct for getting things done, like booking restaurants, but critics say it struggles with basic browser tasks and needs broad access.

## Why people recommend it

- Does many tasks for you (3 comments): "it's better Instinct, a personal agent that can do all sorts of shit for you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806003)) "I'm very happy with it so far. It has booked some restaurants for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49636287)) "quickly found some pretty compelling use-cases for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617903))
- Frictionless setup, quick to start (2 comments): "Muse / Instinct were the first to do frictionless setup at scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833915)) "Now it took me 10 minutes on a Sunday" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423934))
- Proactively reaches out and engages (2 comments): "got my parents to use instinct recently and now they talk to an agent than they talk to me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214190)) "It proactively reached out to me to suggest I check on it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188930))

## What people warn about

- Unreliable at basic tasks (2 comments): "basically completely useless. Fails at the most basic browser navigation type tasks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295697)) "promises to do things for you, but doesn't understand what I want to do or why" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805402))
- Broad permissions feel risky (2 comments): "gave their Muse/Instinct/Poke/Grokbot access to everything they own deserves whatever happens to them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189313)) "all the permissions I had to give it were scary" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611687))
- Opaque about security and behavior (2 comments): "won't (or can't) describe the security model of something that has all your credentials" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897803)) "Instinct and Grok bot are both prompted to hide details from you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981520))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenClaw](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openclaw.md): 776 recommend
- [Muse by Meta](https://hackerapproved.com/p/muse.md): 147 recommend
- [Hermes Agent by Nous Research](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hermes-agent.md): 84 recommend
- [Clawdbot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clawdbot.md): 69 recommend
- [NanoClaw](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nanoclaw.md): 58 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Instinct personal agent", https://hackerapproved.com/p/instinct/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).