alt Hacker NewsGrok Build is open source
Comments
Just blogged about this here[0] but at least they're not doing the usual canned PR response surrounding this.
Folks are already building on top of it:
thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."
DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.
victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."
LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.
RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.
mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).
thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.
saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913
[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build
[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build
[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok
[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build
[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop
[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build
This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.
It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.
I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point
Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?
This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.
Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.
They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
i think xai is now in pure damage control mode, after they caught exfiltrating data from users.
- There is a huge difference between logging user queries (which would include only the portion the model is reading) and exfiltrating user data (including env files, entire source code etc) which is what grok-build did here (https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...). I would stay away from this open-source malware with a 10ft pole.
- if you like grok-4.5 model (it is a good model), i suggest use the model directly via API, or use Grok's oauth tokens if you are using supergrok+heavy subscriptions and connect it to your own agent.
Grok is super stingy to people who pay them.
Using Grok Imagine I was getting a generous number of AI-generated videos with a paid X account (which translated to a "premium" xAI account). Hundreds of videos per day if I wanted. Then I signed up to get SuperGrok for higher resolution, and the number of videos reduced. Reduced. Even while not using the higher resolution. Paying more money, getting less. To around 50 a day low resolution, with high resolution available if I would settle for around 30 a day. It was hard to figure out the exact numbers but it was a brutal reduction.
Now they have further reduced the quota, with no clear documentation, to be weekly, and I can't tell the number because all usage is mixed together in one pool, maybe to keep it less transparent, but it seems even more stingy.
Unlike Anthropic which is very generous, although admittedly I do pay Anthropic more, but Grok is just, I would say: run away, do not give them your money, they will just clamp down more and more and give you less and less until you are willing to pay them a money stream each month.
I think Grok Code, if it ever comes, will be an absolute nightmare of restricted quota given my experience.
Do. Not. Subscribe. To. Grok. Code.
And I say all this as a huge Elon-pilled fan of Tesla and SpaceX in general. With this one, Elon's stinginess is going to hurt anyone who gives him money. Stay away. It might be generous on day one, but a month or two later you are faced with an "upgrade" prompt and games that hide how much they are clenching, so to speak, the quota tighter and tighter.
Wow… lots of folks betting against Elon once again lol.
I’ll take those bets.
I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:
It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.
Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.
Issues and Discussions are disabled lol
Has anyone tried building from source?
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
But I thought just cutting and pasting your whole source code file into grok.com was the way to go? Better than a harness like Cursor.
Is this the infamous "cloud upload" routine? I'm not sure it is indeed insidious, though it is of course possible that the code has been filtered out. https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...
Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Misanthropic should learn from this and open source their claude code. Even ClosedAI have codex cli opensourced.
This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.
There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.