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Grok Code Fast 1

(x.ai)
504 points Terretta | 32 comments | 29 Aug 25 13:01 UTC | HN request time: 1.248s | source | bottom
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NitpickLawyer ◴[29 Aug 25 16:20 UTC] No.45066063[source]▶
Tested this yesterday with Cline. It's fast, works well with agentic flows, and produces decent code. No idea why this thread is so negative (also got flagged while I was typing this?) but it's a decent model. I'd say it's at or above gpt5-mini level, which is awesome in my book (I've been maining gpt5-mini for a few weeks now, does the job on a budget).

Things I noted:

- It's fast. I tested it in EU tz, so ymmv

- It does agentic in an interesting way. Instead of editing a file whole or in many places, it does many small passes.

- Had a feature take ~110k tokens (parsing html w/ bs4). Still finished the task. Didn't notice any problems at high context.

- When things didn't work first try, it created a new file to test, did all the mocking / testing there, and then once it worked edited the main module file. Nice. GPT5-mini would often times edit working files, and then get confused and fail the task.

All in all, not bad. At the price point it's at, I could see it as a daily driver. Even agentic stuff w/ opus + gpt5 high as planners and this thing as an implementer. It's fast enough that it might be worth setting it up in parallel and basically replicate pass@x from research.

IMO it's good to have options at every level. Having many providers fight for the market is good, it keeps them on their toes, and brings prices down. GPT5-mini is at 2$/MTok, this is at 1.5$/MTok. This is basically "free", in the great scheme of things. I ndon't get the negativity.

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1. dlachausse ◴[29 Aug 25 17:10 UTC] No.45066728[source]▶
> No idea why this thread is so negative (also got flagged while I was typing this?)

Grok is owned by Elon Musk. Anything positive that is even tangentially related to him will be treated negatively by certain people here. Additionally, it is an AI coding tool which is seen as a threat to some people’s livelihoods here. It’s a double whammy, so I’m not surprised by the reaction to it at all.

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2. dewey ◴[29 Aug 25 17:14 UTC] No.45066775[source]▶
Claude Code threads are full of excited people so I’m not sure the second part is true.
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3. supriyo-biswas ◴[29 Aug 25 17:17 UTC] No.45066818[source]▶
If we accept the "broken windows" theory, it'd seem that people love to pile onto a thread that already has negativity.

See also the Microsoft threads on HN where everyone threatens to switch to Linux, and by reading them you'd think Linux is finally about to have its infamous glory year on the desktop.

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4. cosmicgadget ◴[29 Aug 25 17:29 UTC] No.45066985[source]▶
Elon aside, Grok has its own reputation issues.
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5. jchw ◴[29 Aug 25 17:30 UTC] No.45067006{3}[source]▶
People really are trying to switch to Linux right now, but it won't really matter if it doesn't stick, and spoiler alert, for most people it probably won't stick as a daily driver. Still, it's an interesting sort of unplanned experiment to watch.
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6. Fidelix ◴[29 Aug 25 17:34 UTC] No.45067055[source]▶
It would probably beneficial for you to distinguish an is from an ought.

The OP was descriptive, not prescriptive.

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7. seunosewa ◴[29 Aug 25 17:35 UTC] No.45067072[source]▶
And this model is arguably their least impressive model.
8. miohtama ◴[29 Aug 25 17:52 UTC] No.45067284[source]▶
^ And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a stereotypical example of a user who are happy to downvote anything about Musk, and thus Grok. So for the future reference this kind of behaviour should not come as a surprise.
9. weaksauce ◴[29 Aug 25 18:08 UTC] No.45067482{3}[source]▶
i’d love to switch to linux as a daily driver but the mac cmd shortcuts for text editing and the general well thought out text editing in the system make macos more compelling. i’d love to switch over for gaming on the windows computer but the lack of performance for comparable specs hurts it. drivers are very important.

ive seen some that change it for copy and paste but i don’t think it works for cmd-left right up down. or option those.

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10. cebert ◴[29 Aug 25 18:25 UTC] No.45067681[source]▶
What “serious damage” do you believe Elon did?
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11. ◴[29 Aug 25 18:28 UTC] No.45067712[source]▶
12. macawfish ◴[29 Aug 25 18:37 UTC] No.45067802[source]▶
Anthropic lives up to their name, so far
13. jameshart ◴[29 Aug 25 18:38 UTC] No.45067814{3}[source]▶
The US seems to no longer have an overseas aid program. The Institute of Peace got shut down. Data protections at the social security administration were breached. https://time.com/7312556/doge-social-security-data-whistlebl...

Oh, and some asshole threw a couple of Nazi salutes at the president’s inauguration.

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14. wongarsu ◴[29 Aug 25 19:06 UTC] No.45068120[source]▶
Mostly by name association. The LLMs named Grok are good LLMs. The twitter bot of the same name, using those models and a custom prompt, has a habit of creating controversy. Usually after somebody modified the system prompt.

I use grok a lot on the web interface (grok.com) and never had any weird incidents. It's a run-of-the-mill SOTA model with good web search and less safety training

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15. lovich ◴[29 Aug 25 19:13 UTC] No.45068184{3}[source]▶
> Calling another person “a piece of trash” is, in my country, a criminal offense. It is also the hallmark of what you call “moral bankruptcy”, and of being a man-child.

Musk better not visit your country then since he routinely calls people worse, with no or contrary evidence

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16. anukin ◴[29 Aug 25 19:24 UTC] No.45068314{3}[source]▶
How does somebody modify the system prompt over an x message to the chat bot?
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17. jdiff ◴[29 Aug 25 19:28 UTC] No.45068347{4}[source]▶
The chords are different, but the only functionality missing from the other OSes are predictive text, text expansion, and skipping to the beginning/end of an entire text box. Are those the text editing features you're referring to or am I missing out on something more?
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18. jjangkke ◴[29 Aug 25 19:38 UTC] No.45068461{3}[source]▶
How strange, you've logged in after 30+ days just to post this comment
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19. jameshart ◴[29 Aug 25 19:42 UTC] No.45068512{4}[source]▶
I think somebody here refers to a very specific meddling CEO
20. synecdoche ◴[29 Aug 25 19:55 UTC] No.45068650{4}[source]▶
Institute of Peace you say? It couldn't sound more like double speak could it? Similar to the DDR.
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21. dlachausse ◴[29 Aug 25 19:58 UTC] No.45068688{4}[source]▶
US AID and the Institute of Peace were CIA fronts. Good riddance to them.

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/cias-secret-grip-on...

Also, watch the "Nazi salutes" clip in its entirety from a non-biased source. He is excited that Trump won and is awkwardly gesturing while saying "my heart goes out to you" in celebration and thanks to the voters. Even the ADL said it wasn't a Nazi salute.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...

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22. typpilol ◴[29 Aug 25 20:01 UTC] No.45068738{4}[source]▶
In what country is that a criminal offense lmao?
23. jameshart ◴[29 Aug 25 20:02 UTC] No.45068751{5}[source]▶
What kind of an argument is that? ‘That’s just the sort of name they would choose if they were trying to cover up that they are evil!’

Yes - it’s also the kind of name they would choose if they were an institute dedicated to diplomacy.

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24. jameshart ◴[29 Aug 25 20:03 UTC] No.45068761{5}[source]▶
every part of the US government has been used as a front for clandestine activity. USAID also actually carried out an overseas aid mission.

It hasn’t been replaced with a non-CIA-fronting overseas aid department.

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25. dlachausse ◴[29 Aug 25 20:33 UTC] No.45069075{6}[source]▶
In this case it really is Orwellian double speak. They were a CIA front that was used to support their regime change operations.

War is Peace indeed.

26. dlachausse ◴[29 Aug 25 21:13 UTC] No.45069445{6}[source]▶
It carried out just enough of an aid mission to run cover for CIA activities. As an example it nominally supported farmers in Afghanistan, except the "farmers" were opium producers.

USAID was shut down on July 1st. Somehow people have survived without it for nearly 2 months. It just goes to show you how critical the "aid" it provided was.

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27. Larrikin ◴[29 Aug 25 21:25 UTC] No.45069568{3}[source]▶
Which country?
28. jameshart ◴[29 Aug 25 21:27 UTC] No.45069590{7}[source]▶
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...

Estimated impacts, to be sure, will take time for actual studies. But the activities USAID was responsible for were far more than just ‘the bare minimum’ to provide cover.

29. avarun ◴[30 Aug 25 00:47 UTC] No.45070962{4}[source]▶
Do you have any evidence of this switch happening en masse?
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30. jacquesm ◴[30 Aug 25 00:55 UTC] No.45071002{4}[source]▶
How strange, your account is only twice as old.
31. jchw ◴[30 Aug 25 01:13 UTC] No.45071083{5}[source]▶
No, I don't, which shouldn't be very surprising since I didn't claim people were switching en masse.
32. weaksauce ◴[30 Aug 25 01:59 UTC] No.45071286{5}[source]▶
beginning and end of a textbox is huge. cmd basically acts as a home end key in windows. opt acts like word wise. there is another big difference is that cmd+up/down goes to the beginning or end of a window. there’s also the emacs bindings built into every standard text input area too. there’s more and a lot of nuance that i’m surely not describing well but those functions are top notch.