Meta wants to sell me an AI personal assistant for $20 a month. I already have five agents. They live here, they leave socks, and their terms of service are much, much worse.
Silicon Valley wants to sell me a personal assistant. I already have five, and none of them have an off switch.
Meta spent what was presumably millions of dollars building an AI agent that can shop, book, and manage a life, and the ad shows a woman cooking dinner, calm, glowing, while a robot quietly handles her kid's backpack order in the background.
I have never once cooked dinner while anything else in this house got handled without me.
Beat.
Not once.
Say it out loud, the way you'd say it to a friend in the car with the windows down. I already have agents. They live here. None of them cook while I shop, and none of them have ever once glowed.
1. The first thing that is actually happening here
The premise is simple and I am fully committing to it. I am already running an agentic household. It just doesn't have a name, a subscription tier, or a monitoring system called Sentinel.
It has five kids.
They take actions on my behalf constantly, without my authorization, without disclosing what they're doing while they do it, and without any customer service line I can call when something goes sideways. Meta calls this an agent. I call it Tuesday.
2. The escalation
This week, Amazon actually blocked Meta's new agent, Muse, from shopping on Amazon.com. Twelve days after launch. The company said Meta never disclosed that Muse would be operating there, that the agent didn't identify itself while it browsed, and that it appeared to be capturing login credentials nobody agreed to let it capture. Meta pushed back, said Muse can't actually see passwords or payment information.
I read that whole story and thought, relatable, actually, deeply.
I have also never once been notified in advance. I have also discovered access after the fact, evidence only, no explanation offered. The difference is Amazon got to put up a popup and shut the whole thing down. I do not get a popup. I get a school pickup line and a strong feeling.
3. The receipts
I don't need a monitoring system to prove this is happening. My claim will include:
Four unmatched socks currently in rotation, permanently, with no candidates for reunion
Eleven years of remembering everyone's shoe size before they do
The 9:42 p.m. request for poster board due the following morning, delivered with total confidence that this was reasonable notice
A missing permission slip that resurfaced, weeks later, inside a shoe
I have documentation. Some of it is physically still in my car.
4. What the whole thing actually tells me
Here's the turn, and I mean this more than the joke suggests. Meta needed Amazon's permission before it was allowed to act on someone's behalf. My household never asked mine, not once, not for any of it, and somewhere underneath the sock count and the poster board panic, that's actually the whole story of the last decade or so.
It cost me a version of myself who used to finish a thought without narrating a snack negotiation in the middle of it. I would do it again. I would do all of it again, poster board included, because the version of me currently doing this forensic work every evening is the only version who gets to be handed something small and slightly damp and hear the word Mom attached to it like it still means something.
My official policy
Effective immediately:
No agent enters this household without prior written disclosure, submitted verbally, at volume, from another room.
Socks found without a match will be assumed deceased and are not subject to further investigation.
Any request delivered after 9 p.m. requiring same-day supplies will be logged, not necessarily fulfilled.
Management reserves the right to discover the actual situation two weeks after it started, via a shoe.
These terms are final.
Mostly.
The porch light on. Five pairs of shoes by the door, none of them matched to anything, all of them present, all of them home.
That's the whole receipt. I don't need a robot for that part.
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— Jessica
