

dpolishuk
267 posts






codex should give one month free when you send them your claude cancelation screenshot


After spending the last few days with Grok 4.5 + Grok Build, I think xAI has built one of the most compelling terminal coding agents available today. Not because of benchmark scores. Not because of marketing claims. Because I put it through the same kind of long-running engineering work I use every day. I ran exactly the same task through my Xpowers agent framework using three different models: Grok 4.5 Kimi K2.7 GLM 5.2 Everything else was identical. Same planning. Same harness. Same MCP servers. Same tools. Same workflow. The only variable was the model. Only Grok 4.5 completed the task end-to-end without requiring manual intervention. That's not a scientific benchmark, and I'm not claiming it's universally better than every other model. It's simply one real engineering task from my daily workflow. But I've stopped caring about benchmark leaderboards. The question I optimize for is much simpler: Can an agent take a large engineering task and actually finish it? For this task, Grok 4.5 did. The bigger surprise, though, wasn't the model. It was Grok Build. This is the first terminal agent I've tried that immediately understood my existing development environment. On first launch it automatically discovered my MCP servers, imported my existing skills, picked up my tooling, and started using everything without me rebuilding my setup. No copying prompts. No migrating configs. No spending an hour making the new agent usable. I installed it. I typed a command. I started working. That onboarding experience is honestly the smoothest I've seen. The closest experience for me is Z Code 3, but Grok Build currently has the best first-run experience I've personally used. Another thing I appreciated was the overall product polish. The new TUI is excellent. The animations and visual effects are subtle, responsive, and actually useful. They make long-running agent sessions feel alive without becoming distracting. It's one of those details that sounds minor until you spend your entire day inside a terminal. Combined with the onboarding experience, it feels like xAI spent a lot of time thinking about developer experience—not just model quality. I also smiled at one small product decision. The executable isn't just grok. You can simply run: agent That tells you exactly how xAI sees the future. Not another chatbot. Not another CLI. An agent. It's a small detail, but it's surprisingly confident product positioning. Is Grok Build more mature than Claude Code? I don't think so. Claude Code still feels like the more mature overall product today. But Grok Build has made an incredibly strong entrance. Fast execution. 500K context. Excellent tool use. Fantastic onboarding. A polished terminal experience. And, most importantly for me, it successfully completed a large engineering task inside my Xpowers workflow where the other models I tested did not. That's enough to earn a permanent place in my toolbox. Great work, @xai and @elonmusk









1. Get idea for new project 2. Purchase domain 3. Create git repository 4. Get distracted and forget about project Repeat until you're out of money
