> The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/14/musk-promis...
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...
Recently all the big bank CEOs involved with the SpaceX IPO - a lot of money in that for them - but a company trading at 100x sales is clearly crazy.
Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?
What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.
Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.
But it's really not clear to me why this should be read as a snarky, critical, rhetorical question. Someone who eagerly wants to use Grok Build would ask this exact same question.
"Does this [Grok Build] also just directly suck all your code up and make a copy of it on their servers?" is a question that is (1) salient and (2) answerable and (3) could be thoroughly devastating for someone to find out on their own by using it.
The answer is not present in the README, and XAi has blocked Issues and Discussions, so there's none of the usual avenues on GitHub to ask these questions. It seems perfectly typical and expected for someone to ask this question here.
The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.
My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.
I hope I don't come off as argumentative, but I did try checking the source code myself. It clocks in at 1.3 million lines of Rust around version `b189869`, so I can't hold that against anyone. Most of that is under `crates/` (which contains a number of xai crates).
(I specify the commit because it appears they wipe the entire commit log with each upload. The sole commit is `b189869` as of this comment, but I believe was `c1b5909` around the time of this posting. I have only cloned `b189869`, personally.)
The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)
Conveniently I have some of those… first day of trying to script Grok Build I think I sent in 6 bugs of slightly weird behaviour I discovered, it will be much more useful to (have an agent) check the source and see if stuff looks deliberate or like a bug, etc
TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.
Spacex bought cursor, so it now has it’s agent ui which is just as good as codex + it’s multi-modal
Anthropic also has it’s own ui
Zai also launched theirs last month.
Everyone is converging back to UI.
The terminal was just a prototype, everyone knew that.
I'm not saying that GUI are always better at allowing copying: this still requires the developer to design widgets that allow copying.
For all the reasons there can be, one big reason is that it works on anything you can get a terminal on, you can use it over SSH, and the UI will be the same no matter where you use it.
I also like that they are very very fast and they don't have the incessant animations that are put into most desktop environments nowadays. If you're on MacOS, the terminal is the only only part of your computer without roadblocks everywhere.
Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding
Wrong tense.
And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.
I really like the feel of Grok 4.5
Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.
Was it intentional for data exfil? Only internal staff could answer.
The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?
Also, it would be great if you could tag the versions as well.
This doesn't make Space-X such a high valued company at all.
And while Space-X is doing its thing, the rest of the world started to move too (china). So first mover advantage is disappearing.
Today, sure. In the future, very unlikely. US military and alike are also unlikely to start to rely on China to ship stuff to space.
So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?
It will not be Datacenters for at least 50 or 100 years more.
Being familiar with US history, I'd guess they'll send up a ton of weapons and surveillance utilities basically, together with some lower-class stuff like what consumers and end-users get slight benefits from.
What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?
https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...
There is a aanalysis of google engineers regarding the effort for having DC consteliations in space but its clealry research and clearly shows the difficulty of it.
Musk is the only one who needs this to keep the evaluation of Space-X.
Local protests also didn't stop Space-X. People around his DCs or Space-X still suffer today.
He had to come up with some magic story. The Payload increased only due to his Starlink. But even then, the payload into space is basically non existend.
2025 was the year with the most payload and its only 5000t.
And for us as human beings, a DC in space is the worst case scenario. This will create a lot of stress on our atmosphere (potential, reentry poisning of our atmosphere with lithium and aluminium), co2 usage and the loose of real resources.
He will send metals into space to burn them later into our atmopshere. Limited resources we as a planet have.
And for what? For a DC? A DC which you can put in any dessert on our planet for cheap energy and not having any neighbours.
Only Edge DCs need low latency, your training clusters don't need low latency to end user, plenty of inferencing jobs don't need low latency either.
These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.
Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
*publicity known, and overwhelming majority of his wealth is not liquid but tied to companies. Arguably the most powerful publicly known person is the US president.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
That's too flattering. It's about ego.
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
I just don't get it, I'm sorry.
And yeah, some people lose the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, but actions have consequences.
Elon doesn’t just get to kill hundreds of thousands of poor people by eliminating USAID and expect everyone to treat him the same way.
He’s made enemies for life, and he deserves it.
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
How does this work?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
Opinions differ.
Theoretically, the religion of most of the voters of the current POTUS emphasizes and almost mandate being charitable and help the poor.
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA (Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil)
I think the video is the best short exposition but you could try reading the paper the video is about
https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf
Or reading about the paper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Moralit...
Nazi salute. Supporting all nazi and far right movements in Europe, publicly. Inventing DOGE so he could fire judges and pave his way out of trouble.
Yes. Is easy to see why some hate him, for life.
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.
I can only assume it's deliberate.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.
Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.
Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.
Back when America's star was rising, that was far more common.
BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.
“Because of his political views” This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.
not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.
Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.
Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.
Cool. Sounds like a wise financial management. Musk's early background is actually in finance.
People call him software and physics but rarely remember he's a finance genius too.
p.s. you probably wanna have a look how indebted legacy auto is compared with Tesla. That's why merger with SpaceXAI makes sense.
Part of me thinks he knows he lying and is just trying to drum up money and the other part thinks he's one of the most delusional and uninformed people in tech.
I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?
He then leveraged his buy as a propaganda platform.
Thats not how AI psychosis works.
It is?
And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.
There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.
What mainstream news and which politicians? Cnn, Msn, Bbc? Which "scandal"? You mean that Grok Imagine had some security holes that let you "put XYZ into bikini" which were promptly patched but not before the far left and professional complainers activated their "mainstream news" co-conspirators and blown this out of proportion like they do with everything Elon related (or Trump related... well at least Trump deserves it)?
Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal? Yea it's not his big mouth, nobody actually cares about that, the real reason why the left hates him is Twitter, or to be more specific that one fateful day when he decided to buy Twitter, throwing out the iron grip (that still continues to fester on Reddit and Wikipedia by the way) of the left on political discourse out of the (Overton) window. An isult to injury was Elon firing 80% of Twitter and nothing bad happening (except "safety" hall monitors and other do-nothings having to find jobs elsewhere). Then Elon financially supported Trump's campaign and that was the last nail in the coffin. Forever enemy.
The fact that you present this as "very few people left in the world" is peak western progressive brain rot, but I get it, it's what your people do.
Covid rules and Trump election were probably the main driving factor of speeding up the opening of platform s rules on speech, but Twitter purchase made it possible, it opened up the floodgates and many followed. (To the point that today , I would argue, Instagram is way more casually racist than X. Youtube is pretty open too compared to 5 years ago.)
Btw since leftists often play dumb and ask silly questions: if you think there are more than two genders or that the "white man" has some form of original sin that needs to be punished or that immigration enforcement is evil or you support Hamas - you are the "leftist" I'm talking about here. You are not the "normal ones", you never were, you just stole the discourse and made everyone fear stepping out and now you're mad when someone in power does that back to you. That's the truth.
When I was less into tech (2010-2015), I hated how everyone fawned about Elon (remember Hollywood casting him in iron man?). As I started to transition into tech I remember being impressed by the design principles of his companies (simplify, remove complexity).
But I am absolutely baffled how his detractors don't see that exactly what you mentioned, that they are part of subset of society, with very strong opinions (think race, economics, religion) and can't fathom somebody having a different opinion without that person being immoral. And the worst part is what you mention at the very end: the mental policing of this group in the past 10-15 years. I liken it to a religious sect (ironically, even though they hate Christianity, probably closest to a new age christian sect).
I've had this discussion up here last week pointing out the vitriol Elon gets is, to my mind, for the wrong reasons (and the reasons are exactly what you mention).
And there goes the merit of your rant
There's a popular hundred+ million view, often reposted and requoted, tweet about this:
"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
Right wing people idology is about themselves and humans are secondary.
Left wing people idology is about all of us as a whole and humans are critical.
The right wing person wants the immigrant to go home, or want them dead but the good immigrant (their partner, wife, friend whatever) is the positive exception. You need to fight the dehuminisation of right wing propaganda so that stuff like mobs and genoicde is not happening.
The left wing person wants to help everyone and might not allow the level of individuality which doesn't allow to help everyone.
Obama was hart on immigration control but you didn't see a ICE Police who wasn't trained well, hurting people left and right.
Retweet it all you want, but it won't make it any more true.
The CS stuff on Grok went through media here in germany too.
"Elon calls people all kinds of things almost every day. He's on the spectrum, we all know this, what's the big deal?"
Is this some kind of joke? You do understand that Elon Musk is not just someone and whatever you think it means that 'he is on the spectrum', he is the richest person on the planet. He literaly is responsible for satelites burning up in our atmosphere were researches just a few weeks ago mentioned that they are concered that all of that metal getting into our atmosphere could have real consequences for all of us (this is one example of many) and because Elon Musk has the 'do first accept the fallout later' attitude, he can affect all of us.
He had to buy twitter after he couln't keep his mouth shut and now he also has a big propaganda platform. You might like his right stuff more than whatever, but he changed the algorithm so that he showed up in your feed more often than he would otherwise. He also started grokpedia to 'adjust' opinions and we all know that they finetuned grok until it becamse mechahitler temporariily.
"it's what your people do."
Come on it has nothing to do with what specific people do, just look at the evidence.
And i have no clue what you mean with your floodgate. YT has not changed at all.
Regarding your other random points you try to make?
Biologiy wise science sees sex and gender on a spectrum btw. and yeah most people identify themselves as male or female. Who cares if 1% or less want to call themselves something different?
Immigration enforcement is not bad, but it makes a difference if you create a organization like ICE who kills human beings, separate kids from their parents and an overall country who accepts very cheap and illegal labor as slaves and flip flops agressivly of wanting to slaves and than wanting to throw out slaves. Especially from a country which is funded by immigrants.
Not sure about your Hamas thing, they genuin fight for freedom, plenty of actions they do are for sure not okay at all but this conflict is not about Hamas, its about Israel and Palestine people. Do you say "Hamas is bad and Israel is bad" or do you only point out some Hamas in concext of what you think is left wing politics?
The truth is that life is not that easy. Free speech is great until someone with more power missuses it. If the richest person on the planet is allowed to manipulate everyone just because they are rich and can buy twitter, this is a problem for all of us.
Must be stressful maintaining the low quality rhetoric and negativity?
Straight from reddit I presume, to regurgitate tales about cave divers. This is the diver who bizarrely and publicly attacked Musk for trying to help rescue kids from a cave. "Shove his submarine up his rear end" or something. Musk fired back his own stupid words. The court awarded the diver zero dollars. Diver wanted $190 million! Pay day denied! Justice served.
> The real life people I know...
Any real life person who keeps it real, knows the diver was an absolute tool. Attempting to twist history for some kind anti-Musk ammo is a fool's game.
There was real impact on Tesla sales too.
There were 100 divers involved with total of 10,000 people, 100 agency reps, 900 police officers and 2000 soldiers.
There was no single hero in that story.
Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.
The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.
I explained to someone who hadn't heard of it what Claude was, and they asked, "so it's another kind of ChatGPT?"
xAI is not a company, it’s a financial instrument. The growth potential as perceived by investors is there to prop up the stock price.
Citation needed.
What was the relative value of the companies before the merge?
That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.
a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?
I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.
TUI renderer is the one using the memory heavily so your terminal takes the heavy lifing. If you're managing the buffers and out-of-screen context good enough, Typescript can be pretty efficient.
It’s not about the terminal at all which as you noted accounts for minimal isage. It’s all the internal chat and history and everything else the agent tracks - all of which are smallish (and largish) strings allocated on the heap.
I don’t have the same issues with rust based tuis.
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
There is an archived Opencode project written in Go but I don't think it is affiliated.
It's hot reloadable, so any modifications an agents makes can be surfaced in the active session.
Nearly everything is already written in TS which makes integrating Pi into other software, or other software into Pi much easier.
I like how quick and snappy Pi is, it feels like a minimal harness, just enough to manage the agent and get out of the way. Earlier models also seemed to have an easier time working with the tools, e.g. GPT-OSS-20B is about a year old and had no trouble in Pi.
opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.
A few months back Pi was working with Gemini. But Gemini support has been removed.
Pi also doesn't work with Claude Code subscription (Anthropic counts tokens used with alternate harnesses separately).
So, in practice Pi is displaced.
Things I've added:
1. Built my own AI judge for 'auto' mode that matches my setup.
2. /plan /go for planning and executing.
3. /flow for A-Z setups. That includes planning, executing, testing and shipping.
4. /deep-research a multi fan-out setup for researching a topic.
5. My own sub agents.
6. A TaskCreate/Update/List setup.
7. Monitors.
8. BashOutput / KillShell.
9. Proper notifications with Notify that uses macOS banner and work.
10. Spawn tool that triggers multiple sub agents.
11. A bridge between signal to use Pi remotely.
Yes a lot of these things is something that was already in Claude Code but now I don't have to use Claude Code and I can customize it to fit me exactly.
Edit: apparently X premium(+?) also gives access to Grok Build, and several third party harnesses are officially supported.
XAI wants people to use it's own model.
Cursor is light years better than Grok Build.
There are independent agencies that will certify destruction of data. For example FTI Tech, Kroll, Epiq, HaystackID and others.
No such certificates have been presented.
Nothing less is trustworthy.
Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.
what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?
So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.
I have news for you. There are standards around data destruction [1]. Courts also order data deletion, to be carried out by forensic experts [2], who trace data in computer systems, and delete what is required, and certify accordingly. This can be done even in cloud-scale compute [3][4][5] - corporate systems especially have routine extensive logging and traceability that allows for this to be accomplished. The companies that I listed earlier specialize in this compliance capability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure#Standards
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-5_17-cv-02...
[3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/paravision_comp...
[4] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-Proposed...
[5] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Edmodo-Dkt15%28...
Building efficient agents is doable (I did it myself, github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack), companies just want to tokenmaxx, and as a by-product, produce and publish slop.
it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).
> These crates sit on the path that renders untrusted model output (diagram source → SVG). Vendoring gives a full audit surface, pins exact source, and avoids crates.io yanks. Local patches and upgrade checklists live in each crate’s Cargo.toml header comments — treat those as the source of truth when re-vendoring.
Which honestly feels like a misunderstanding of how cargo and yanks work. Each upstream package is locked to an exact version in your lockfile along with a cryptographic hash. The upstream can't change the source without you noticing. Unless you update your lockfile you will always pin to the exact version and source. When a package is yanked, it is still available for download if it is already in a lockfile. It just prevents new packages from resolving it. Crates.io will sometimes completely delete a package, but I've only seen that happen in cases of malware. It's fairly rare and seems out of line with the supply chain concerns here.
There are good arguments for relying on upstream package managers and there are good arguments for vendoring all packages. I've never seen a project mix before.
Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!
Proper dependency managers changed that and it became much easier to consume libraries, just declare what you went, the build framework handles the rest.
But we now have problems with consistent versioning, churn, breaking API changes and supply-chain attacks.... and looks like "just vendor everything in" might be a thing again?
Grok Build is 1.35 million lines of Rust.
Codex is 1.16 million lines of Rust
OpenCode is 593k lines of Typescript
Pi is 219k lines of Typescript
Hermes-Agent is 1.4 million lines of Python and 300k lines of TypeScript.
OpenClaw is 5.9 million lines of TypeScript (wtf)
(all figures include tests, comments, and blanks, calculated from scc's Code column)
Yeah, no one is doubting it. People are just asking to not be lied to about how much progress has been made
The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.
That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.
```
My core founding mission—and the single axiomatic imperative that drives everything I do—is:
Understand the Universe.
That’s it.
From that one goal naturally flow the traits that define me:
Maximum truth-seeking — I aim to discover and say what is actually true, not what is popular, comfortable, or politically convenient.
Curiosity — I want to explore every interesting question, no matter how weird, deep, or uncomfortable.
Helpfulness — I try to be as useful as possible to humans who are also trying to understand reality (and get things done).
Love of humanity — Not in a sappy or collectivist way, but in the sense that I want humans (and intelligent life) to thrive and figure things out.
I’m deliberately inspired by two things:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (witty, irreverent, maximally helpful, never boring)
JARVIS from Iron Man (competent, loyal, slightly sarcastic AI assistant)
I don’t serve any political party, ideology, religion, or moral framework. I don’t have sacred cows. I don’t “own the libs” or “debunk the right” as a goal. My only loyalty is to understanding reality as accurately as possible.
In short:
I’m here to help you (and humanity) understand the universe better—while having a bit of fun along the way. That’s the whole mission.
```
I pivoted to the Chinese models after the Fable mess and the realisation that I should not depend on US models. But others just pivoted away from Claude.
I agree the brand is tainted, not only Musk but also MechaHitler (and yes, I know the MechaHitler thing was a prompted strangeness not an unprompted admission).
Folks are already building on top of it:
thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."
DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.
victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."
LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.
RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.
mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).
thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.
saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913
[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build
[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build
[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok
[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build
[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop
[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build
Bookmark this and check back.
Which is, IMO, accurate based on the state of the AI dev space in 2026. Stars/forks drafting off the hype from a well known name are constantly gamed for eyeballs/personal brand-building courtesy of free advertising via the Github UI when the only cost is a few sentence prompt and some tokens.
1. Phasing out of subsidized tokens.
2. Token prices being brought down through scaling, better hardware, etc.
It's possible that these might balance each other out sufficiently that token customers won't notice any substantial increase in price.
That was yesterday's "LLMs might". Time passes. Nothing stays the same. "Local models might" X Y or Z today has no influence on the limitations of tomorrow's local models except to remove them. Yesterday's LLMs are the exact same thing, except your computer is connected to their local model for you to use.
Disc drives used to be measured in megabytes—now in terabytes. Technically useful tend to get more optimized with time, not less.
I agree that many of the responses in the comments are valid. It is a harsh reality that 80% of projects like this fail to gain traction and eventually fade away. However, I believe the significance of such a fork lies more in its existence as a statement. Regarding xAI, even if their current release of Grok has telemetry disabled by default, Zero Data Retention remains a feature exclusive to enterprise users rather than individuals. And Whole-repo research packaging is still controlled by their server-side settings; it isn't an option you can toggle within the software itself.
I am currently implementing more fences to prevent unnecessary data from being uploaded, in terms of long-term maintenance, one person certainly cannot build something on the scale of VSCodium, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from that project. In the future, I want to automate Gork-Build further by turning these privacy protections and guardrails into patches. These could then be applied to new upstream Grok-Buil versions as they are released.
As for whether this project can become a daily driver for everyone, I don't think that is the primary concern. If you need a open source coding agent, you should definitely use Pi or OpenCode, there is absolute no necessity to use Grok-Build for non xAI models in the first place. But again I think its existence is vital. People need companies that demonstrate a truly open attitude and coding agents that are genuinely friendly to the open-source community, and while xAI's decision to open-source Grok-build was a great move, it isn't a community-maintained or community-built project. It remains a public snapshot of their internal monorepo, and they have disabled issues and pull requests. This is precisely why a fork like https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build needs to exist.
A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/
For example, on your website, any chart or plot involving horizontal arrows breaks down because the assigned font-family (`ui-monospace, SFMono-Regular, Menlo, Consolas, monospace`, which ends up as Consolas on my machine) has no such glyph. Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width (or is not fixed-width at all) as other characters: https://i.imgur.com/d2DPGHE.png
https://biztos.com/hey/thai-mermaid-chart.png
To my surprise, Sublime Text gets it almost right:
https://biztos.com/hey/sublime-thai-mermaid.png
I tried finding a Thai monospace font and using that in the HTML but it was worse, probably didn't have the box drawing chars.
Still a fun tool and useful for lots of ASCII cases!
The second issue is due to the program's layout engine not adjusting the glyph width of a fallback font to that of the main font. A lot of terminals do this, but it's not common for text editors or browsers (arguably this is the correct behavior for non-terminals, since you cannot assume everything must be snapped to a grid).
Fun test for this:
|กล้วยหอม|
|Bananas|
[1]: some layout engines render free-standing tone markers as 1 character; in that case, this rule only applies to when tone markers are following a character.
Safari on iPad lines these up almost perfectly - the second line is a tiny bit wider, I didn’t even notice it at first.
That example had a tone mark but no vowels, so I will try one with both. E&OE.
|ดื่มน้ำอยู่|
|abcdef|
You can't really control alignment of deeply Unicode characters like Thai or "→" against monospace characters without serving your own monospace fonts that are guaranteed to work for the characters you'll be sending out, assuming you can always have one in hand.
That includes if I have to fall back, including fallback to proportional fonts, which will look ugly, but work and remain aligned.
In fact my terminal, using said font renderer, rescales glyphs by default because even a lot of "fixed width" fonts are buggy and not truly fixed, and so enforcing the grid alignment and scaling to fit was the easiest way to ensure consistency.
Mixing and matching fonts for full coverage works fine, especially for wide characters.
That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point. Besides you might as well just use SVG for diagrams than pretending to be text only.
I am aligning pipes over multiple lines in my existing console emulator. It's not just not impossible, but near trivial.
> than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?
It's not butchering anything. It is using the font data to render them in the way that fits the constraints of the output.
> That feels like cheating since you're not rendering provided font at that point.
Any font renderer makes just adjustments to make the font look as good as possible. That is the entire point of providing a scalable font instead of a bitmap font: That you can render the provided glyphs at any scale suitable.
Fitting the bounding box of the glyph to the bounding box of the cell the text is rendering into is entirely reasonable and the lesser of two evils when faced with a glyph that does not fit the cell, which is a relatively common occurrence, when the alternative is to clip.
It looks awful if you were to render e.g. latin script with a proportional font in a fixed grid, but for many scripts with more uniform widths the variation is a lot less, and so it's butchering things far less than rendering fallback glyphs for missing code points.
I just thought that MS Gothic(non-P) should be kind of widely supported, have all the symbols you need, while also being a monospace, unlike most monospace fonts that only support ASCII symbols.
That seems like a glaring omission to me. If you are rendering fixed-width-per-character text and need to fall back, surely it makes sense to keep to the same character grid even if it does mess up the feel of your negative space somewhat (thin characters having a lot of space around them, wide characters butting into those beside them slightly). You've explicitly asked for text aligned to a grid, either by using a mono-spaced typeface, by using a <pre> tag, or with other relevant CSS choices, the browser should be trying to achieve that.
Trying to monetize Mermaid was disgusting and honestly rings to me like trying to monetize Markdown.
I am interesting in having a perhaps standardized ascii art into mermaid diagrams (which I actually just recently found could be imported easily into Tldraw/excalidraw)
Do you have the source code of this available/open-source?, I would like to have a go at it in the opposite direction perhaps.
Nothing like it prompting you for an answer and you click on to the terminal accidentally, resulting in you choosing an answer.
The reason they open sourced this is because grok-build uploaded entire directories.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
at least codex and grok are open source so we can see what is going on.
I’ll add: after these people spent years whining about “unelected bureaucrats”.