Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of secure password vaults in your text messaging. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about agentic AI messaging systems. So there's been all these new products, right? Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots, Instinct, a bunch of other startups coming out, all with the same idea that basically what you want to do is message with an AI assistant that will then use agents to go and accomplish stuff on your behalf. And I say stuff in the loosest possible way because they all have big different ideas about what you might want your agents to do. Allison Johnson on our team has been testing all of these. They're all very similar in certain ways and all very different in interesting and important ways as we try to figure out how people actually want to use AI. So she's going to come on the show and we're going to talk through how we feel using these products, whether they're any good, and which one you should be using. All that is coming in just a sec. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.
I'm Travis Larch and this is 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, October 6th, 2026. The 110 billion mega merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery is complete. The combined company is called Skydance and it includes Adult Swim, Alloy Entertainment, Animal Planet, BET, Bleacher Report, Boomerang, Cartoon Network, CBS, CMT, CNN, Comedy Central, Cooking Channel, DC Comics, Discovery, Food Network, Golf Digest, HBO, HGTV, Magnolia Network, MTV, Network 10, New Line Cinema, Nickelodeon, OWN, Paramount, Pluto TV, Pop TV, Quest, Science Channel, See It Now Studios, Shed Media, Smithsonian Channel, TBS, The Free Press, TLC, TNT, Travel Channel, Turner Classic Movies, TV Land, and Warner Brothers. Also, Amazon bought the rights to stream the Emmys. So starting in 2027, you'll need to go to Prime Video to find out who wins among however many networks we have left at that point. More info keeps trickling out about the upcoming Fitbit Edge. The new leaked details shared by Deal Labs suggest it'll end up costing around $180 in the US and that it'll have an always-on OLED touchscreen and offer up to 7 days of battery life, so long as you don't leave the always-on OLED touchscreen always on. And finally, PC Magazine reports that Trump Mobile appears to have suffered a data breach. The data set includes 3,615 people's names and contact information. I have nothing to add other than 3,615 is an awfully specific number. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, October 6th, 2026.
All right, let's talk agents. The Verge's Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.
So, are you the kind of person who, outside of journalistic responsibility, would have downloaded an app like Muse and tried to find things to do with it?
Boy, is that hard to know because I was told immediately that I would be using these things. I think it appeals to me in the way that there are too many things to do and not enough time. So, so yeah, maybe.
I guess maybe another way of asking this question was how hard was it for you to figure out things to do with all of these agent assistants? Because I think I've been gone for a couple of months and all I have had time to do is sit and do things that only require one hand while I have a baby in the other hand. And one great thing to do is just goof around with weird AI assistants that claim to do things for me. And so in a funny way, I've been the exact optimal target for these things in that I have stuff I need to accomplish and I need the simplest possible way to accomplish them, including not having to type in hexadecimal passwords all the time. And I understand that I am at a very particular moment that is not representative of how most people experience these things. So what is it like for you? The sort of cold start problem of you've tested a bunch of these things. Do you open it up and immediately have a bunch of ideas in your head about how to use a product like this?
It is a little bit of the blank page kind of cold start effect where you're like, 'Huh, what do I do? What is my life? Do I have to?' And then I don't know. I was coming off an extremely busy week and I've been traveling. So I sat down with Muse and it didn't take too long. I was like, 'Okay, I do have a backlog of stuff that is just piled up.' Like my husband's been taking care of the kid alone for a week. He hasn't had time to deal with stuff. I have not had time to deal with stuff. So there was a list of things that I could get it to do. So that helps.
Yeah. I do think one of the things I always see on my social feeds, which I always enjoy, is the people who defend AI are constantly like, 'If you think people don't have giant endless tiny low-stakes to-do lists all the time, you have never met a working parent.' And while that obviously doesn't describe everybody, boy do I agree with that thesis. So you've tested Meta's Muse, you've tested OpenAI's Dots, and you've tested this app Instinct, which is a startup that's running mostly through iMessage. I'm fascinated by your experience with those three in particular because I kind of think you've seen the spectrum of the ways this thing can work, right? Everybody is building this AI assistant. Everybody is building a thing that you can message with that will go through things on your behalf. This is the only idea in Silicon Valley right now. The three flavors of it as far as I can tell are the three that you've tried, right? There's the one that lives in your existing messaging app. There's the one that just is a messaging app, which is Instinct and Muse respectively. And then there's Dots, which is a feature that lives inside of a larger AI ecosystem, right? It's not Dots in an app, it's Dots inside of ChatGPT. Of those three, dedicated app, inside your messaging app, part of a broader AI thing, which feels right to you so far? Which have you gravitated to the most?
They've all kind of shown themselves to have different strengths to me. But the one that strikes me as the most useful in a day-to-day way and the least intrusive is Instinct. Because it is just in your messaging app and that makes it kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Like I'll think of something and I have my smartwatch on. So I'm like, 'Oh, I can fire off a text to Instinct.' You're in the car and you can do CarPlay kind of things. And it's also the most just to the point getting things done. You're kind of constrained in that you're typing out a little message on your little smartphone keyboard. You don't get long-winded responses. It's very like, 'Got it, doing that thing,' or even just an emoji reaction. Which is funny. I'm like, 'Don't pretend you're a person with a sense of humor.' I don't know.
Yeah. Anytime he gives me the thumbs-up tapback emoji, I'm like, 'You don't have thumbs? Get out of here. What do you know about thumbs?'
You don't know about thumbs?
I think I agree. And part of the reason I've been thinking about this is I will say for regular people, I'm all the way out on the Dots approach, right? And I think your experience with Dots was that this is, I think you called it, work software that will order me a burrito. And I think that's exactly right. And I think that's very useful as far as it goes for people who will use it for business. I think that's a non-starter for regular people in their regular lives. Muse I think works because it feels like a messaging app and obviously Meta is going to put Muse everywhere. It's going to go in WhatsApp. It's going to go in Instagram. Meta will eventually percolate this to lots of messaging apps and I imagine that's where it will be very successful. The place where I'm torn is Instinct is very understandable in the way that you just described, right? I know what it is because it's a thing I text message. It doesn't have any pretense of being a thing that I've installed on my device. It doesn't try to ask for any kind of disk access. I know the box around Instinct in a way that's really helpful. That also causes a bunch of problems. Like, have you ever had to open up the Instinct browser when it's trying to do something and it gets hung up on one of those prove-you're-a-human moments? Have you ever had this happen?
Not with Instinct, but I did with Dots and it felt weird. I felt like I was an underage kid asking you to buy cigarettes or something, you know?
So for whatever reason, for me with Instinct, it runs into Cloudflare's prove-you're-a-human thing all the time. And when you open up the browser, it opens up the browser in the little thing and you have to then mouse around and it just breaks, right? Because it has to exist in these very specific confines.
But then with Muse, you get access to all that stuff and it can do more things that way. It can more accurately connect to the connectors because it can just offer you a list of connectors that you can tap on. So Muse is very simple in that way, but it's also more complicated. And I don't know, I've really gone back and forth between... I have had that same experience that you have where it's really nice to just fire off a text message and not really think about any of the infrastructure around all of it, but to the extent that you kind of have to have some infrastructure, like you have to do a little bit of work to let it access your Gmail, it just is a little bit easier that way. I don't know. I've struggled with this. Muse has felt more like if I'm sitting at my computer, which is funny, like, you know, as a Meta product, but it was more useful for me when I was sitting down. I didn't even necessarily have the desktop app open. I was like in a browser window. But then you have more canvas. You can see its little computer that it's clicking around on. You just have that quick clear view into like, okay, I have my mouse controls to take over when I need to do that. Yeah, Instinct by its nature I think kind of abstracts that away and it's just sort of like, don't worry about it. Let me handle this. I got it. You sometimes get that secure login link to get your Gmail or whatever credentials stored safely, etc. We love it. You run into that sometimes and you're like, oh, this is software that, you know, you're like, I see you behind the curtain. There is an app running here. You're just not showing it to me, right? But otherwise, it's like you're just text messaging a very helpful little guy somewhere, I guess.
Yeah, I've really come around on it on that front because I think in the early days of some of these apps when most people were using it for, you know, Claude Code and OpenClaw and stuff, I was like, the idea of accessing this stuff through Telegram just feels wrong. Like I need a different kind of interface than just messaging. But for the stuff that these things do well, which is very basic one- or two-step tasks, just send a text message actually kind of works for me. And I've really come around on the idea that actually maybe I do want to message some AI system to accomplish things for me and maybe that's good enough.
What's the most surprising thing that has worked for you in testing these things? Either something that you really pushed that worked and you didn't expect it to, or something that worked in a way that you didn't mean it to but was cool anyway. Like what stuck out as the hero experience so far?
Oh gosh, several things. First of all, Muse as a shopping platform is just so sleek and frictionless. It's like you get your credit card in there one time through Stripe or whatever and it's like, I'm just going to run all over the internet and buy things for you.
Somewhere an army of Facebook ad product managers just got a raise the minute this published.
Hats off. It's just like you don't even have to click a button. You just type the words 'go ahead' and it just fires off the transaction for you. This is problematic in many ways for me personally in my bank account. But also just kind of like, yeah, the product working as intended is almost too good for those purposes. I think the other thing that kind of caught me off guard on the other side of the spectrum was working with Dots. My personal dot, which I called Dotty...
Dot has dots. I think it's dot and dots.
Dot, plural of dot is dot and also dots.
Could also have dots. Yeah.
My dot is named Dotty McDotface because I can't help myself. But I was trying to do all the consumerish stuff. I was like, I am trying to set up a new ISP at my house and it was kind of clunky and not working great for all that stuff. And I was like, oh, you just got to do work. Like this is just work software. So I started bossing it around and I was like, go update my personal website. And it kind of came back with some stuff. And it has the option, I think a few of these do, maybe they all do, where you can call it, quote unquote, and talk to it. This is a big feature of Dot in particular though, the voice mode assistant bit of it all. Maybe it's sort of more present in a way where it's like you can just call your dot. I was like, that's going to feel weird and dumb and I don't want to do that. And I called it and I was firing off just a bunch of stuff I wanted it to do. It gave me a draft, like kind of proposal of what this website redesign would look like. I was like, I'm just going to talk to this thing for 10 minutes and say everything that's wrong with it and just kind of went section by section. And I kept being like, so you're with me? You got all this? It's like, oh yeah, yeah, good. And then you just sort of end the thing by being like, okay, can you go do all that? And it was like, yep, got it. And it did a pretty good job. It wasn't perfect, but I was like, that actually was better than sitting and typing paragraphs of thoughts about what I wanted. So it was surprising in that I was okay with it and I did not think I wanted to talk to the robot on the phone.
That I have really struggled to adopt in my own behavior actually, because I think I'm so used to commanding computers that my instinct even when using one of these tools is to be very short and very direct and very sort of turn-by-turn, like do this thing that I'm going to explain very clearly and in one sentence so that you don't get distracted. You're going to go do that thing and then I'm going to give you another sentence of things to do. And actually, there seems to be a lot of evidence that the best thing you can do is just ramble nonsensically at it for like 10 minutes and that actually these tools are very good at distilling that into something more useful than you would have commanded it in the first place.
It's really interesting. I just am so bad at remembering to do that in using these tools. It makes more sense I think in work, like you giving it a large data set which is just me rambling, as opposed to like, I'm hungry, get me a burrito, you know, is not quite the same use case. But yeah, although I don't know, I find myself increasingly far apart from our commenters on how I feel about a lot of these things I think.
I think my moral feelings about AI, I largely agree with our commenters. I think AI is built on bad things. I think it is run by companies that are doing bad things to the world. Like I think it's all bad. I think these products are actually really good and useful in a lot of ways. And I think the cognitive dissonance of that is the great question of our time. But right now I think, like I look at the DoorDash news from last week, right? Where they're like, you can just chat to DoorDash and say order me the thing that I got. I want that so bad in my life. Like once a week... I'm lying. Four times a week, I go into the Toast app and I order the same thing from a coffee shop and I go and pick it up. And if I could turn that from 10 taps in Toast to just order the usual in a text message, that's good. That is a better user experience for me than being in a Toast app. And this runs into I think the thing that you have been reckoning with a lot and I have been thinking about a lot while sitting on my couch on leave is this question of is that friction by definition a good thing, right? Like you look at the comments on any piece that you've written about this stuff and you've talked about this on the show too, all of the responses are why are you trying to automate being a person out of your life, right? And I think David ML and Liz Leato and V Song did a great episode talking about this stuff, like what does it mean to be a person is strangely important to being a technology journalist in 2026 in a way that I didn't... like basic humanism is at stake right now. And I feel like for you in particular, you've had to really think about this in sort of a brass tacks way, like what does it mean that I am giving these tasks and not these tasks. Again, I think you are required by the virtues of your job to overindex on doing the thing, like your own morals get sort of subjugated to what we need to do in order to thoroughly test these products. But how are you feeling about that? Like do you spend a lot of time with Muse and feel sort of icky in the way that I feel when I look at TikTok for too long?
God, I have a lot of thoughts about this. And it sort of started to percolate when Google was adding the automation stuff to Gemini like way earlier this year where it would tap around on the DoorDash app and order some food for you.
And you see it work once and it's sort of like, oh yeah, of course. Like why wouldn't I do this version of just saying something to it and going, hey, order that thing for me rather than tapping around. Of like all things being equal, I'd pick that one, you know. But there's...
You know what's interesting, there was a... sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but there was a really great piece in The Atlantic a week or so ago that made an argument I have not been able to stop thinking about that basically what we have done with technology is convenience our way out of ever interacting with people, right? And so instead of walking into a place full of people and talking to the person at the counter and having actual human interactions, we've all just reduced ourselves to I can do all the work on the screen. I find that argument incredibly compelling. Like if you want to say throw your phone in the ocean, go talk to the barista, I'm here for that argument. I have a much harder time with the using Muse is a morally inferior tool than going into the Toast app to order to go. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. I think so much of our lives have already been kind of commoditized and automated anyway. And it's not like an endorsement of how we live, but it's like, yeah, like I do place a to-go order with Starbucks as I'm running out the door. It means I don't talk to the barista. I've had very lovely conversations with the barista at the Starbucks I go to. One of them saw me come in throughout my pregnancy and I came in, she was like, 'Did you have that baby?' I was like, 'Yeah, I had that baby.' You know, you have those women stuff right there. Yeah.
That's the spice of life right there.
But it's sort of like when you have the option for convenience and you live a life at the speed of, 'Oh my god, we got to get to this kid's birthday party. We're late for it already and we just finished up the grocery shopping.' You know, your life has already accumulated so many tasks and things. You're like, 'Yeah, I will automate this one thing.' And you know, a coffee at Starbucks is a luxury and a convenience in itself. But yeah, I think about this a lot. It's sort of like, you know, I think about my dishwasher. I love my dishwasher. I will not live without a dishwasher, you know, if I can help it. Would I gain something, I don't know, in sort of like morally by doing my own dishes, you know, after every meal. Having that time to totally think, you know, about anything. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing out on some kind of like spice of life experience. But you live in a... I just keep coming back to we live in a society, you know, and it's like we have all of our coworkers and bosses have dishwashers and if I was the one insisting on, you know, no, I got to slow down and do all my dishes and my friends are, you know, I don't know. It's kind of a strange example, but I think we live this out in a lot of little ways of like if I insisted on, I don't use email. If I was like, I use pen and paper and I'm going to talk to my colleagues that way, like that.
I call that Christopher Nolaning. If you decided to Christopher Nolan...
