Grok Code Fast 1

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.

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.

It is forgivable because there is no real understanding in an llm.

And other llm can also be prompted to say ridiculous things, so what? If a llm would accept a name of a Viking or Khan of the steppes it doesn’t mean it wants to rape and pillage.

Your suggestion that an oversight like this is reason enough to not use the model?

I don’t get the big problem over here. The model said some unsavoury things and the problem was admitted and fixed - why is this making people lose their minds? It has to be performative because I can’t explain it in any other way.