Grok Code Fast 1

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.

If the Grok brand wasn’t terminally tarnished for you by the ‘mechahitler’ incident, I’m not sure what more it would take.

This is an offering being produced by a company whose idea of responsible AI use involves prompting a chatbot that “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos” - https://www.404media.co/grok-exposes-underlying-prompts-for-...

A lot of people rightly don’t want any such thing anywhere near their code.

How exactly is a code assistant “partisan”? I don’t use X but I’m open to buying a Tesla and grok for code purposes.

Kinda weird to mix political sentiment with a coding technology.

Well, you’d also be forgiven for thinking ‘how on earth can a social website chatbot be a white supremacist?’ And yet xAI managed to prove that is a legitimate concern.

xAI has a shocking track record of poor decisions when it comes to training and prompting their AIs. If anyone can make a partisan coding assistant, they can. Indeed, given their leadership and past performance, we might expect them to explicitly try.