You text. A cloud computer works.

Your conversation lives in WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS or email. The work happens elsewhere: delegated tasks run in an isolated cloud sandbox (an independent teardown confirmed Firecracker microVMs from the provider E2B), and websites are driven in a leased cloud browser, not the browser on your desk. The web app at app.instinct.com is mostly an admin panel.

One command line, hundreds of tools

Instead of a fixed menu of functions, Instinct's capabilities sit behind a single command-line-style surface: delegation, to-dos, mail, messaging channels, the browser, a queryable data store, and the alarm clock that wakes it. Its own help index reports 43 tool families and 571 actions; the teardown's recount found 569 to 577 depending on how you count, and reports all three numbers honestly. A rule worth knowing: an action refuses to run until its own manual has been read. Reliability by design, at a cost in speed.

Three memory stores, three jobs

• Markdown memory files under version control - the part people notice. Corrections keep their history.
• An indexed layer of your connected data - email, calendar and files, searchable by query rather than chat.
• A fill-only credential vault - it can type your card number into a checkout but cannot read it back, to you or anyone.

Two teams probed this from different angles (a teardown site, and supermemory's founder on 20 September) and landed on the same shape from outside.

It wakes itself - with a seatbelt

Instinct does not only answer. A clock can start it (your 7am brief), and so can an event: new mail, a calendar change, a document update, your location. Between "something happened" and "act on it" sits a platform-side safety check - the detail nobody puts on a landing page and everybody should ask about, as the teardown put it.

What nobody could find out

The same teardown lists its unknowns plainly: the full instruction set (27 sections, only headings seen), which host the main agent runs on, the production model id, and four named policy sections it found pointers to but never text for. A site that tells you more than that is guessing.