I got early access to instinct.co this week.

It's waitlist only right now, rolling out slowly to tech insiders. I still don't know exactly how I ended up on the list. I've been playing with it for a few days now. It's genuinely good. It reminded me of an agent I built myself in early 2025, one that took hours of trial and error to wire up. Instinct does the same thing without any of that friction. Everything people have said about it online is true: https://x.com/ElliotComite/status/2087972328902660269

Then, on Friday night, the night before my son's SAT, I panicked.

I was lying in bed running through the next day in my head (route to the test center, snacks, pencils, the usual) when a different thought elbowed its way in. Who actually runs instinct.co? I couldn't find much about the company. No team page, no funding info, nothing that told me who was behind it. And I'd given it access to my Google account to get it working.

That's when the spiral started. What is it doing with that access. What can it see. What happens to my data if this company disappears in six months. I was supposed to be thinking about my son and instead I was doing a forensic review of an app I'd installed three days earlier, at 11pm, the night before one of the bigger mornings of his year so far.

I think we've all been here in some version. A call from a number you don't recognize that claims to be your bank. An email asking you to "verify your account." A new tool that seems too good, so you start looking for the catch. Trust, especially with something that touches your data, builds in stages. You extend it, then you second guess it, then you either relax or you pull it back.

For Google access specifically, pulling it back takes about two minutes, and now I do it as basic hygiene whenever something new asks for that kind of permission:

Go to myaccount.google.com/security. Scroll down to where it lists your connected apps. Anything that looks unfamiliar, or that you barely recognize, click it and select "Delete all" to revoke its access.

I did that Friday night. I slept better. And Saturday morning I was where I was supposed to be: focused on my son, not on a company I'd known about for three days.

I still think instinct.co is worth watching. I just watch it now with fewer permissions than I gave it on day one.

Alex