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Grok Bot

222 pointsby rvzyesterday at 5:23 PM176 commentsview on HN

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jjcmyesterday at 7:27 PM

I've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution. I highly suspect others will be following suit. I was surprised with how much it felt natural to interact with agents in this way.

Biggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them.

Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month.

Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world.

The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag: https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we...

I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.

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anthonyskipperyesterday at 10:30 PM

The scariest part of the interaction is the first video at https://x.ai/bot where the bot just snags your creds from the browser and takes over. So many people are going to give x all their data and creds.

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dgellowyesterday at 5:58 PM

Are you all comfortable with the idea of agents running non stop with access to all your accounts? I would be so anxious all the time, thinking they would leak or delete my personal data, or get hijacked via prompt injection or a security vulnerability. I just cannot imagine using such a software without overview

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stillpointlabtoday at 3:39 AM

This is obviously the future, where this will all end up. But just like when I saw the demos for Google's "AI build the interface dynamically", I wonder how much of the demo actually translates to real usage.

One thing that this highlights for me even more than before is that having accounts for my bots is what I really want. I want SaaS providers to catch up to bot use. They need their own accounts on a lot of these services and per-seat pricing works against this.

XCSmeyesterday at 10:54 PM

The eternal fight between bots and anti-bot systems.

The difference now is that big companies themselves promote/offer bots, but they also don't like to be scraped and use captchas.

What do we do now? Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system? Is it allowed to scrape data? Are there any laws for this?

If we do things manually it is ok, but not if we use a bot?

Confusing (legal) times...

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drop_staryesterday at 11:02 PM

So OpenClaw that steals your data and profiles you for the US gov. No thanks.

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whimsicalismyesterday at 10:31 PM

How do they stop providers (like Amazon, etc.) from detecting and blocking these agents if they are running on cloud? I know that openai wasn't able to avoid this which is why they moved to 'computer use' on your local machine.

I almost wonder if this is a place where SpaceX, as an internet provider through starlink, has a unique advantage because websites are unable to block their networking as it could be residential starlink consumers.

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dylanhouliyesterday at 11:40 PM

I feel like we'd be better off if we just stopped at chatbots...why are we so eager to make the internet even more botted

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wiradikusumayesterday at 7:44 PM

From FAQ: How is Grok Bot different from AI assistants? Bots have their own computer, so they can work inside your apps and tools. They also run in parallel, 24/7, even when your laptop is closed.

How does it work with login-walled sites like LinkedIn then? And what does "own computer" mean? X provisions a "private cloud" a'la Apple for your Bot?

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madebywelchtoday at 4:07 AM

My initial impression is strong: Agent-to-Agent comms are clearly a first-class citizen of this tech. There's a cohesion that's palpable. Maybe it just fits my workflow better than other tools. I have some routines set up for tomorrow morning that will tell me if the juice is worth the squeeze.

48% weekly usage left after 3 hours of experimenting, tough.

natsucksyesterday at 5:50 PM

everyone is shipping their in house solutions and they all seem...kinda the same.

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kervyesterday at 10:07 PM

Are there any opensource app/system that directly competes with a solution like this?

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impulser_today at 2:07 AM

The problem these model providers have now is there software is basically useless.

Tell me one reason why I would use this at my company? I basically have to bet on Grok being the best models for this.

Or I can use an open source version and use whatever model I want.

You see this with coding agents, everyone used Claude Code and then realized holy shit this is expensive and now use open source agents and they can use open source models and cut costs.

arjietoday at 2:15 AM

This looks amazing. Lots of good ideas here. The human in the loop story is quite good here. I will shamelessly lift it for myself.

mrtksnyesterday at 10:35 PM

Interesting how everyone seems to be following OpenAI on UX. When I used Antigravity and they suddenly switched to Codex type UI I was very annoyed because I kept checking if this is Codex or Antigravity.

Either way, I still don't think that computer use is solved. It worked horribly on Codex and Antigravity the last time I tried. Maybe I was doing something wrong.

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mike_hearnyesterday at 8:26 PM

Neat. I haven't had access to Grok Bot but I rolled my own async agent a while ago using systemd, Codex and old school UNIX stuff like sendmail/postfix/Maildirs. The model gets a rolling and continuously compacted context window in which mail arriving or timed wakeups cause Codex to resume a session with a prompt telling it to do stuff.

As it's linked to an SMTP gateway I interact with it entirely by email. It also has API keys for my internal bug tracker, it has its own git forks of my repos and so on.

Over time it's improved itself so it has adaptive wakeups, a nice monitoring dashboard so I can see what it's doing if I want, a bunch of skills, a nightly wakeup to reorganize its home directories and so on. It keeps a private knowledge base in its home dir and writes its own skills, and it has a persistent todo list. When the todo list is populated it wakes up more frequently so it can break work up into chunks, a kind of basic Ralph loop.

I've found this email-centric paradigm works pretty nicely for me compared to just running a local CLI agent. For instance, I can assign a bug to "Axiom" (it named itself) in YouTrack and the email notification causes it to wake up and start work on the bug. If it gets blocked, it uses its API key to post a comment back to the ticket. If I think of something I just quickly email it, so I'm using Gmail instead of dealing with finicky ChatGPT style UIs that don't have good support for labelling, compact UI and other nice things.

On older models its judgement about what to work on wasn't that good, but with the latest GPTs it's doing much better. I just got back from holiday and it had triaged and resolved over 25 different bugs, a nice selection too.

Because the whole thing runs in a dedicated UNIX user account it is able to modify its own configuration, which has helped as I developed this setup.

However, based on the blog post, Grok Bot sounds a fair bit more sophisticated. I haven't felt a need for more than one bot as I can't easily saturate even a single bot.

Cost: just uses my regular ChatGPT Plus subscription, $20/month, plus of course the server it runs on (which is shared with lots of other stuff). I'm not working with it heavily, perhaps if I did I'd need the $200/month sub.

jujube3yesterday at 9:46 PM

Grok lobster! (Rock lobster music starts playing)

Adrigyesterday at 7:15 PM

Alt link to the landing page if needed: https://x.ai/bot

Although I'll probably never use Grok, this is an interesting release. I always thought GPT work and Claude Cowork are a bit awkward in their positioning. I'm still not sure what the real difference is with standard chat. This looks like the same thing with seamless memory and skills creation.

This seems like the middle ground between work mode and OpenClaw/Hermes (which I've never tried, too scared to mess something up). I think the humanization of the agents is cute and makes sense UX wise. I hope to see alternatives soon.

no-name-hereyesterday at 5:38 PM

Pricing: https://x.ai/bot

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indigodaddytoday at 2:13 AM

This seems like a disaster waiting to happen

ls612today at 3:15 AM

So this is a Hermes Agent plus a credential proxy it sounds like?

LaurensBERyesterday at 5:43 PM

Pricing: 120/200 USD per month, per employee.

This is an interesting idea although I'm not sure how many companies are comfortable with giving SpaceXAI access to all your files and data. Outside of America this is, most likely, not going to fly.

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johndhitoday at 12:22 AM

Do you have to pay the companies for a second login for the bot...?

chaostheorytoday at 4:10 AM

It's a great idea, but the problem is with the latest versions of Grok. It's like xAI copied Google's Gemini. Grok now minimizes its effort. Like Gemini "Pro", it's become a flash model that provides shallow answers quickly.

h14hyesterday at 10:40 PM

I've already been doing something very similar to this with OpenClaw, where I set up multiple different Telegram bots each with different system prompts to tune their personalty & behavior.

It's not trivial to do, and I never managed to get bot-to-bot communication working. Even with my janky setup, the experience is honestly pretty great. Grok Bot simplifies the setup for this about as far as I imagine is possible, and frankly it's a pretty slick experience.

I fully expect this paradigm to catch on quickly.

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apiyesterday at 11:52 PM

What happens if you troll this by asking it to implement a DEI hiring policy for your company?

jknoepfleryesterday at 5:47 PM

Somehow the American AI industry managed to create a product I trust less than existing commercial offerings. Kudos, that is actually pretty impressive. Considering the stakes, one might also call it foolish. But I'm sure they've done their market research, they've identified their product niche and they're racing to meet it at the bottom.

Computer0yesterday at 9:35 PM

I am unsure if this is the end all be all but it appears preferable to claude code desktop to me.

c0rruptbytestoday at 12:27 AM

they probably should kill the grok branding...

tonyhart7yesterday at 5:39 PM

so like OpenClaw ???

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jjcmyesterday at 7:44 PM

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261532#49263241.

Dang - might be worth merging these two.

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tonethemanyesterday at 9:49 PM

[dead]

basiswordyesterday at 5:41 PM

Interesting. Unfortunately Musk's personal brand is so poisonous that I would never let him anywhere near my data. I'm curious if big businesses will have similar concerns and avoid tools from SpaceXAI regardless of how they are? I guess lots are already using it by default since the Cursor acquisition.

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jesse_dot_idyesterday at 9:47 PM

I think perhaps I won't trust anything that ever gets released by this company, likely in perpetuity.

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high-priesttoday at 1:25 AM

yo this is crazy bro

vorticalboxyesterday at 6:09 PM

GitHub login on iOS is just broken.

GitHub gives 404 after logging in so I can’t event try it.

razorbeamzyesterday at 11:52 PM

Why would anyone want to bring the CSAM bot into a workplace?

surprisetalkyesterday at 7:48 PM

This seems like a very clever product move from X.ai

I wonder if they're going to try and compete against Slack with X.com chat?

WillMorryesterday at 11:39 PM

I'm a little baffled by this, it's basically like the remote Claude instances I already use every day except it has absolutely no safeguards? If I wanted to make a claude could post to linkedin it would be like one prompt to spin that with playwright. Like you can just have persistent Claude code sessions, if you aren't cost sensitive you can just keep restarting the session whenever.

They're clearly targeting less technical users but in exchange are asking you to upload every login you have to Elon's servers which is an insane thing to do imo. What a world where people are giving their Instagram sign in to the bot formerly known as mechahitler.

theahuratoday at 2:16 AM

in case you are interested in ~this for your team, but dont want to either be vendor-locked to grok or give mecha-hitler extra money, consider trying what we've been building at https://noriagentic.com/ (or any of the other startups working in the same space)