One of my favorite parts of writing AI Insider is hearing from readers who actually try this stuff.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new agent Instinct for the newsletter. Subscriber Donnie Goins emailed to say he was about to sign up for Grok Bot, but after reading my update decided to give Instinct a shot instead. We got him an invite.
A week later, he sent me a detailed diary of what happened.
Goins isn’t your typical tech newbie. He spent decades building software, sold a tech company, and now runs PuttEZ (pronounced “Putt Easy”), a new business that makes golf putting training tools. He already pays for Gemini and Perplexity. Even so, Instinct surprised him.
Rather than using it like another chatbot, he treated it like a colleague.
“Instinct just has the ‘instinct’ to do it without me asking for specifics. Very impressive,” Goins told me. “Now I know why they came up with this name.”
The first job was simple: review the PuttEZ website.
Within minutes, Instinct came back with pages of feedback. It spotted issues, but also fixed them, such as rewriting copy. Goins updated much of the site using its suggestions and said the messaging became clearer and the product pages looked better.
Next came social media.
Launching a new business meant creating accounts across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn — a job Goins had been putting off. Instinct suggested which platforms mattered most, generated bios, keywords, and hashtags, helped create some of the accounts, and walked him through the rest.
Then it moved on to video.
PuttEZ already had instructional videos featuring golf instructor Kelly Mitchum. Instinct reviewed them, suggested punchier thumbnails, wrote titles, and chopped longer videos into short clips for social media. One customer testimonial has already racked up more than 5,000 views, according to Goins.
Instinct also became his marketing analyst.
Every morning, Instinct compiled a report on online conversations about putting, summarized the discussion, and drafted suggested replies. After noticing there wasn’t much happening on some platforms, it recommended adding Reddit to the list — something Goins hadn’t asked for.
“Perplexity and Gemini may offer questions to answer,” he wrote, “but Instinct seemed to truly understand how to help us be more successful.”
Before long, it was helping with operations, too.
PuttEZ manufactures its stainless-steel training products in China, so tariffs and shipping matter. Goins asked Instinct about getting a binding tariff classification from US Customs. It recommended filing for a formal ruling, filled out most of the paperwork, gathered supporting photos, and prepared the application for him to review. He estimated that saved him many hours.
Instinct also compared freight forwarders for a shipment of roughly 600 PuttEZ training devices headed to North Carolina from China, and researched golf creators and instructors who might help promote the product after launch.
The experience wasn’t flawless. Like most AI systems, Instinct occasionally hallucinated. Goins also wished it organized work into separate projects instead of one long conversation. And although it can connect to email, calendars, and Google Workspace, he hasn’t turned those integrations on because he’s still thinking through the privacy tradeoffs.
Even so, he came away convinced AI agents are something different from the chatbots he’d been using.
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