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View on web September 29, 2026 There are two kinds of people in this world: the people who have to think about reservations, and the people who just show up to dinner carefree (and somehow, things always work out). Bettina Makalintal Thought the reservation bot situation was bad? AI could make it worse I’ve never been to 4 Charles, the New York City restaurant where a white-gloved server showily pops and drizzles an egg yolk onto the restaurant’s famed burger tableside, and that’s mostly because I’ve put it in the category in my mind of “restaurant so annoying to get into that there’s no way it’s worth it,” gastronomically, financially, or energetically. Anyone trying to score a reservation at the restaurant — or any others that fall into this category of mine — may now be facing even tougher competition. In early September, Resy banned JC Bahr-de Stefano, a principal at a venture capital firm, for connecting Instinct, a “personal assistant”-oriented AI interface, to his Resy account to try to help him land a 4 Charles booking. This, according to a report by Business Insider, involved a truly inhuman level of trawling: “Unbeknownst to Bahr-de Stefano, the AI agent had been sending Resy about 200 API requests per hour. That included checking the restaurant’s availability through Resy every 10 minutes throughout the day, as well as looking every 0.4 seconds around the time that reservations usually dropped each morning.” Getty Images His example joins a handful of similar anecdotes, seemingly all from the tech-founder-adjacent class. (Two days later, Bahr-de Stefano announced that Resy had reinstated his account, on the grounds that he would never misuse the platform that way again, and that if he did, the company, which is owned by American Express, could cancel not only his Resy account but also any associated AmEx cards. He seems repentant.) But this phenomenon will likely only continue, at least until the reservations platforms really push back. With the launch of Meta’s Muse earlier this month, personal AI agents — a category that includes Instinct, along with competitor OpenClaw — are evolving at lightning speed. Just as Temu promised to let anyone “shop like a billionaire,” as its tagline goes, these personal agents are now effectively democratizing the experience of having a personal assistant, checking account balance be damned. According to Meta, Muse can send your emails, make your plans, book your travel, sell your car, and beyond. To that end, Zoë Schiffer described reservation-booking as “a gateway drug for many agent-curious people” in a recent Wired piece about her experience with Instinct. (She noted, citing a recent 404 Media report, that some of these uses attributed to Muse are really just the work of human beings in call centers, however.) The argument for some users seems to be that if the playing field is already uneven thanks to bots, these different bots might offer people a fighting chance. The rise of the new interfaces is an interesting twist, given that OpenAI also has relatively recent partnerships with Resy, OpenTable, and Yelp that allow diners to make bookings directly through ChatGPT. While some people like Schiffer have found themselves pleasantly surprised by the merits of Instinct, these interfaces warrant some skepticism. In a new appearance on the podcast Invest Like the Best, Instinct’s 23-year-old CEO Noah Shinn explains his vision for how his platform might change restaurants. To date, he says, reservations have been first come, first served, regardless of why people might want to dine there. AI agents, he explains, can make the case to restaurants that certain diners want to visit for special events. “And the restaurant, too, can say, Let’s actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people, I don’t know, whatever it might be,” Shinn explains. As with many new tech products, it’s one of those ideas that sounds good to CEOs,