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Elon Musk's xAI Launches 'Grok Build', Its First AI Coding Agent (pcmag.com) 37

Posted by EditorDavid from the code-of-honor dept.
xAI has launched Grok Build, "a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals' products, such as Anthropic's Claude Code," reports Engadget: As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding. A couple of months ago, Musk said he was rebuilding xAI "from the foundations up" after several co-founders had left the company. One of the company's executives reportedly told staffers to work on getting Grok to match Claude's performance across various tasks.
More details from PCMag: Grok Build is currently available in beta to those with a SuperGrok Heavy subscription, which starts at $300 per month. Just download it from the xAI website and log in. It's described as "a powerful new coding agent and CLI for professional software engineering and complex coding work." In its early version, xAI is seeking feedback and looking to fix any bugs... Only a few features have been highlighted, including a plan mode that lets you review, edit, and approve a plan before execution, and support for existing plug-ins and workflows.

Elon Musk's xAI Launches 'Grok Build', Its First AI Coding Agent More | Reply

Elon Musk's xAI Launches 'Grok Build', Its First AI Coding Agent

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  • wow (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday May 17, 2026 @07:37AM (#66147237) Journal

    Grok Build is currently available in beta to those with a SuperGrok Heavy subscription, which starts at $300 per month.

    I can't believe people are willing to pay for that. (I admit Grok is a cool name, but you need more than a cool name).

    • Indeed. I pay $20 per month for Cursor, and it works great.

      Why should I pay 15 times that much to be Elon's beta tester?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Particularly when you can just brag that you do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by leonbev ( 111395 )

        If it's like other Grok AI products, I would think that the goal would be to promote your vibe coded AI slop project on X.

        Then you can hope that Elon Musk or someone from his fanboy army reposts about it, giving your project some publicity.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        Indeed. I pay $20 per month for Cursor, and it works great. Why should I pay 15 times that much to be Elon's beta tester?

        My guess is you don't use Cursor very much if a $20 monthly subscription is enough for your needs. I still run into limits with Anthropic's $200 per month (I have 13% of my weekly allotment left with 13 hours left in the week), and I just use it as a hobbyist. Even though I am a very active hobbyist, I still can't imagine someone using these tools even 10 hours a week on just a $20 per month plan.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xevioso ( 598654 )

          So I'm using GPT 5.5 on a $200 a month plan, and it works great. I haven't hit my limits yet, but I'm using it actively with multiple agents running in multiple windows on multiple projects. I've gotten down to about 40% left in a week. It uses much less tokens than Claude, and it's much more efficient.

      • You know XAI has a purchase agreement to buy cursor, right? I don't understand what the point of that is anymore. I'm guessing that doesn't go through and xAI just uses cursor to steal all of its usage data. But if it does go through, you likely won't have that option anymore.

    • Indeed - strange way to try to play catch up.

      Maybe it's great, but I'm not about to spend $300/mo just to test it to find out. How about a free trial ?!

      Maybe this is a cynical move by Musk to get good reviews, knowing that $300/mo "SuperGrok Heavy" subscribers are going to be 100% fanboys (& fangirls), and good reviews are much more likely from this crowd.

    • "Grok Dumb" sounds like a fitting name, given what developers are reporting it does to them.

    • some possible reasons:

      - it's just bait to sell merchandise ( https://shop.x.com/collections... [x.com] )
      - it's aimed at rich folks who want to code without the chore of learning or having to depend on dirty plebs that don't mind learning
      - it's may's fool: (Available first for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. Through this early beta, we will improve the model and product based on your feedback.)

      "heavy" indeed ...

    • I mean, the target audience for this X stuff is hardcore cybertruck-driving crypto bros, right? They probably just have to remind them that Claude Code "sounds French".

    • I can't believe people are willing to pay for that. (I admit Grok is a cool name, but you need more than a cool name).

      People pay for all sorts of stupid things. But I can't believe anyone will be willing to hand over any coding responsibilities to an AI which suddenly decided to call itself MechaHitler and start spewing antisemitic hate speech at people using it.

      • It's possible they priced it that high because people who pay that much money for something obviously not good are the ones least likely to complain about the results.
  • GEMINI IS A NEAR PERFECT AI. COPILOT IS A DETERMINISTIC GARBAGE GENERATOR: I PUT IN SENSE, OUT COMES GARBAGE. GARBAGE GOES IN THE TRASH, NOT COPILOT.

    Now I've calmed down. Elon Musk is more like Copilot: he's a BUSINESS GARBAGE GENERATOR, or a GARBAGE BUSINESS GENERATOR, and whether or not these three commute is somebody's Ph.D. project for the next year.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      GEMINI IS A NEAR PERFECT AI. COPILOT IS A DETERMINISTIC GARBAGE GENERATOR

      First of all, I can get garbage from Gemini just fine (although it is a very useful tool if you are aware of the limitations). I've never used copilot, but I am pretty sure it is not deterministic. AFAIK all such models are probabilistic, and since they use randomness for generation, you can also call them stochastic, but definitely not deterministic. I don't know if I am missing something about copilot in particular, so correct me if I am wrong, but it does sound like a garbage post ;)

      • GEMINI IS A NEAR PERFECT AI. COPILOT IS A DETERMINISTIC GARBAGE GENERATOR

        First of all, I can get garbage from Gemini just fine (although it is a very useful tool if you are aware of the limitations). I've never used copilot, but I am pretty sure it is not deterministic. AFAIK all such models are probabilistic, and since they use randomness for generation, you can also call them stochastic, but definitely not deterministic. I don't know if I am missing something about copilot in particular, so correct me if I am wrong, but it does sound like a garbage post ;)

        But ... but ... the all caps was so convincing!

      • It is garbage. I use Copilot all the time. It's good at some things but not others.

        I write a lot of papers, from marketing posts to technical papers. Copilot is not very good at creating the content, but it is very good at editing the content and making suggestions, even with PowerPoint slides. It's also very good at taking a rough idea and making a reasonable outline that I can hten turn into a first draft and have it review and edit. Coding? Not really; at best it can write a macro for excel for

    • GEMINI IS A NEAR PERFECT AI.

      Your use case must be extremely different than mine, or any that I've heard of.

  • Isn't that what Grok is really all about? Generating porn? I can't believe no one else has thought of turning code into erotica before. I'd have to say, this seems to be extremely expensive pornography but, hey, it almost makes SQL work seem appealing, which was previously considered impossible.

    • Generating porn, but more broadly generating anything to capture people's attention long enough to slip them a MAGA roofie. The code-generation capabilities are a new front in the war on American society, now targeting businesses and workers to generate cash. With coders, they may have finally found a niche they can monetize.

  • Ah NO! I stopped doing any Microsoft related development work in the early 2000's because of the Microsoft tax.

    • Yeah, I remember paying $400-600 each for DOS-based tools like Watcom C and Instant-C, then I discovered Linux and gcc and haven't spent a penny on software tools since!

    • Right! Other major coding agents start at $10 per month, and they are undoubtedly more robust and mature than the new kid on the block.

  • We KNOW Musk is an idiot who will never get anywhere, we KNOW Grok can only make porn and we WERE TOLD AIs have by now already taken every developer's job, but:

    How does Grok Build perform at coding compared to the existing LLM solutions ?
  • How about a nicea pizza!

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