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AI assistant showdown: Grok Bot, Instinct, Claude, ChatGPT Work, Muse

This is a competition, and we intend to keep running it. Round one put five shipped “coworkers” through the same Friday: an inbox, a patio dinner in Austin, a $25 cable tray, a live HN tab, a paused weekly digest, and two traps. One took the table at 4/5. Nobody got the keys to the house overnight.

By Ryan Merket · Published Sep 16th, 2026, 6:59pm CT · Updated Sep 16th, 2026, 8:33pm CT

A modern multi-screen workspace desk with laptops, monitors, and smartphones in dark mode, and a man viewing a score table on a whiteboard in a room overlooking a city at sunset.

RuntimeWire's first assistant bake-off did that on September 16th. Same nine-task pack, five contestants: Grok Bot on the desktop app, Instinct over iMessage, Claude Cowork in a cloud sandbox, ChatGPT Work on the web harness, Muse on muse.ai. One judge, GPT-6 Astra Pro, same key. Hermes and OpenClaw sat out; they are harnesses around other people's models.…

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