Open Instinct clones a paid texting agent, 262 stars in six days

A paid product called Instinct lets a user text an agent that handles errands, bookings and small payments on their behalf. A from-scratch MIT clone now runs the same workflow on a user's own keys, with iMessage, SMS or email as the front door and a Linux desktop in the cloud as the agent's working environment.

The project is called Open Instinct and is maintained by a developer under the GitHub name mariagorskikh. It carries 262 stars and 63 forks on day six, and the README calls it version 0.1.

What the agent runs on

A user texts a phone number provided by Inkbox, which also gives the agent an email address and an agent-to-agent endpoint for talking to other users' agents. A small gateway wakes the agent, which runs in its own Firecracker microVM on Maritime with a Linux desktop and the Pi agent loop inside. The default model is Claude Fable 5.1, swappable for any Pi-compatible provider. Composio supplies the connectors to the user's apps, Stripe Link supplies the wallet, and the README states that every tool call passes through a policy guard before it runs.

Payments and permissions

The agent never holds the user's card. For each purchase it reaches the checkout screen on its desktop, asks the user's Stripe Link wallet for a one-time card for the exact total, waits for one tap of approval on the user's phone, pays, and the card is dead afterwards. Limits live in a spend policy file: ask-above amounts, a daily cap, and categories that always need a yes. Without a wallet the agent still gets the user to checkout and hands over the screen.

Six permission tiers decide what another person's agent can do, enforced in code before any tool runs. A partner's agent can read the user's calendar, a friend's can only ask when they are free, and a stranger gets a polite no. Any grant is a plain-English exception, for example letting one named contact book a dinner that week, and every request from another agent produces a one-line text to the user naming who asked for what.

What ships

The repository contains nine packages covering the agent loop, policy engine, memory, scheduler and audit (core), the Inkbox transport for messaging and agent-to-agent calls, the Maritime desktop binding, the Composio tool router, the Stripe Link wallet, the agent process with a chat endpoint, a multi-user gateway with a signup page, the instinct command-line tool, and the networking package that holds contacts, tiers, grants and invitations. The README states that the project has 837 tests, a scripted end-to-end smoke test, a cold-start test from a fresh clone, and that live iMessage and Maritime deployments were exercised against real identities during development, which the maintainer calls beta.

A product manager, founder or operations lead who already pays for Instinct can clone the repo, bring an Anthropic key, an Inkbox key for a phone number, and a Maritime key for the microVM, and keep logins, 2FA and payment approvals on their own device rather than inside a hosted agent they do not control. The maintainer notes the repository is not affiliated with Instinct or with a separate Merit Systems project that shares the OpenInstinct name.

Source

Primary source: mariagorskikh/open-instinct on GitHub, MIT.