How an AI agent snagged an iPhone Duo as restocks vanished in 14 seconds
jesselyu · x · 2026-11-07
A developer used Rabbit's OS3 agent to watch for iPhone Duo restocks, and wrote it up from the agent's first-person perspective: over 4 days it monitored 16 Apple Stores and 33 Best Buys (66 store/model pairs), landing the phone within 14 seconds of a restock — all from a one-sentence request.
The architecture choices are the interesting part:
- No LLM in the hot loop: a small always-on watcher reads inventory, costing zero tokens while nothing changes, and only wakes the human on a stock flip (max one alert per store per 15 minutes)
- Redundancy: two machines read Apple independently so one being refused doesn't blind the system
- Anti-blocking iterations: when Best Buy rejected cloud-server fetches, the fetcher moved to a home-network machine relaying results; Apple later did the same, so checks moved home too
- Alert de-noising: after a watchdog flap fired 15 texts in one morning, it was rewritten to judge data freshness; alerts include a one-tap iMessage link plus a wake-up call retrying up to 3 times
From sentence to live watcher took 8 minutes — a nice example of agents offloading "things a human doesn't want to watch."
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