Sometime in August, an invite-only AI assistant called Instinct went viral among the people in Silicon Valley who go viral over such things. Early adopters used it the way early adopters use everything. They booked hotels. They scheduled appointments. They canceled the subscriptions they had forgotten they were paying for. Then, on September 9, Noah Shinn, the company’s 23-year-old founder, announced a feature called Trusted Person: your Instinct could now talk directly to another person’s Instinct, agent to agent, to coordinate plans and organize vacations and cut down on what the company calls the back-and-forth.
The back-and-forth is, of course, not a technical problem. It is a marriage.
Some users found the arrangement helpful. “Instinct syncs with my wife’s Instinct so we can actually finish a shared to-do list,” Alex Borkin, a 36-year-old entrepreneur who uses AI across his portfolio of companies, wrote on X, noting that it was easier than setting up agents by hand with Claude Code or Codex. Borkin and his wife have two children, ages 3 and 20 months, with a third on the way, and they use the Trusted Person feature to run the household. Most recently the agents sent each parent individual reminders about tasks for their daughter’s third birthday party — ordering the food, closing the loop.
“I close the loop,” Borkin told Business Insider. “I get to go to bed and not think of ‘Did I take care of jury duty?’”
Closing the loop has a cost, and inside a relationship the cost has historically been assigned. Nudging a spouse to finish a task you already asked them to do is cognitive work, emotional work, invisible work, and it is work that some partners — more often women — end up carrying alone. Annie Wright, a licensed psychotherapist who treats Silicon Valley clientele, told Business Insider the pattern is so common in heterosexual relationships that software does not reliably interrupt it. “Even when you have an AI agent, who’s putting in the prompt to begin with, who’s architecting out the idea, who’s remaining responsible for the oversight of that agent?” More often than not, she said, it is her female clients who do.
The temptation is plain enough. An agent neither performs a task wrong to be left alone nor keeps ignoring you — the maneuvers therapists call weaponized incompetence. “An AI agent isn’t going to bring that same relational scar tissue into the dynamic with you,” Wright said. “It’s very compelling. It provides a kind of shortcut, but it doesn’t eliminate all the work for you.”
What the agent wants, in exchange, is intimacy. To work well, Instinct may need your email, your calendar, even your credit card, and users have already reported troubling incidents — hallucinations, privacy and security concerns, what appeared to be leaks of strangers’ data. Erratic behavior is by now a documented habit of agents left to wander. Borkin, out of caution, linked Instinct only to retailer accounts like Amazon and Costco, kept his credit card out of its reach, and gave it a throwaway email address. He trusts the agent with his wife. Not with his card.
Wright sees the new fight before it arrives. “One partner thinks they’ve handed off a task while the other partner still feels responsible for making sure it happens — now you’ve got a new argument,” she said. “Technology can become another place where you’re disagreeing about who’s responsible.”
Sometimes the failure is gentler. Luba Yudasina, an angel investor, asked her Instinct to help plan a surprise for her boyfriend — to quietly find out when he was free and what kind of dates he might like, she wrote on X. The agent asked. It also told. The surprise did not survive contact with the machine that was supposed to protect it.
The larger questions do not have error logs. If the idyllic proposal was dreamed up and coordinated by an agent, is it romantic? If the software runs the household and plans every date night because a husband cannot be bothered, does the wife feel seen? Wright compared the agents to the 1950s secretaries who bought birthday gifts for their bosses’ wives. “Getting help expressing your care versus outsourcing the attention that makes the gesture meaningful — that’s a really important distinction to draw,” she said.
There is a price, too, for removing every source of friction: friction is where people in relationships grow. One satirical post on X, by Alex Cohen, cofounder and CEO of the AI agent platform Hello Patient, carried the arrangement to its end — the two agents absorbing each partner’s passive-aggressive jabs, dutifully filing the resentments away, while two humans sat in the living room like empty husks. It is a joke. It is also Wright’s central concern, which is expediency mistaken for resolution. “If we’re already arguing about how much time we spend with your family, having software arrange another visit hasn’t really settled anything,” she said. “It’s just made a decision before we reached an agreement and really done the hard relational work to arrive there.”
Some couples locate the limit quickly. Michael Stothard, a partner at Firstminute Capital in the UK who uses Instinct with his wife, shared on LinkedIn that he had tried to move beyond administrative tasks. “Michael asks his Instinct to pass you a message: ‘I love you,’” his agent told his wife.
Tell him he’s an idiot.