My first time ordering Starbucks through its new ChatGPT integration, which launched last week, was comparatively a complete mess. Getting started is easy enough, if not exactly obvious: Just open ChatGPT and type “@Starbucks” plus your order. You can probably guess what happens next, right? I promise you’re wrong. “Order me a Venti iced coffee with light skim milk,” I typed, to which ChatGPT responded: “The Iced Coffee is exactly what you’re after—cold-brewed and served unsweetened, so adding light skim milk will keep it smooth without getting heavy.” Cool, thanks for the info ChatGPT. Please order me coffee.

Above the message, ChatGPT added what I figured out was a menu, showing the three most likely things I might have meant by “iced coffee.” Iced Coffee was the first option, victory! But I had to select “Customize,” then scroll through the pop-up UI and select both the right size and the milk addition, or else when I tapped “Add to cart” I got just a Grande black iced coffee.

I should note that this had already taken longer than it takes to open the Starbucks app, tap “Order,” tap the name of the closest store, tap the plus sign next to the drink I always get, and check out. But I soldiered on: I got the drink I wanted in the cart, and then went to add my wife’s drink to my order. She calls it “the fruity tea,” which is not a name, but is the kind of fuzzy search ChatGPT ought to handle well! It offered me Iced Green Tea Lemonade, which is a reasonable but wrong guess. I eventually remembered it was the Passion Tango Tea, at which point ChatGPT offered me another enthusiastic description of the tea. Once again, I scrolled up, I customized, and I added to cart.

At that moment, I got an ominous pop-up: “This chat is nearing its limit.” I’m a free-tier ChatGPT user, but I haven’t touched the app in weeks (I’m mostly a Claude guy these days), so hitting the limit this fast was a bit surprising. Also, why is there a limit at all, when I’m trying to do a thing that theoretically makes both ChatGPT and Starbucks a bunch of money? To get things done as quickly as possible, I went to check out. Turns out, ChatGPT has my location wrong, and offered a list of stores half a state away from me. When I went to the map view, where ChatGPT said I could change my location, all I got was an “Oops! Something went wrong.” message. And right about then, I got another pop-up: “You’re out of messages with the most advanced Free model.” It told me it would reset — in five hours. Until then, I’d be shunted to some other, lesser model.