I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.

Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.

A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.

We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.

So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.

I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.

I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)

I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).

Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.

I refuse to use that product because of the parent company.

once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.

Folks working in US govt tend to, based on convos I've had with one such person.

the new models are quite good, give it a shot

Hi! Grok’s worked quite well for my use cases…

It’s also a great deal!

I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.

it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow

I have. Why do you put faith in anecdotal evidence and a sample size of one?

Back in the day (in AI time) GitHub Copilot had Grok on the 0 github-token cost and I found it to be the best of the 0 github-token models for when my budget was out. Then they went to a multiplier that was not competitive and I haven't look back again. Been meaning too, but for personal use, Deepseek flash is so cheap I haven't felt like spending money elsewhere.

Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?

I am using it for code reviews, and it regularly surfaces stuff that neither Sol or Fable do.

Well now you have so you can retire this talking point

I use it because it's cheap and good enough

I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.

That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.

> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding

Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.

I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.

Hello. Nice to meet you.