Grok Build

You can read the loop. The binary on PATH is a different channel.

Edited by Michael Ruescher / reviewed 2026-08-21

Operator Read

Added 21 August 2026. This is the grok binary, not grok.com chat and not the model.

You can read it. xai-org/grok-build is Apache-2.0 Rust, published 15 July 2026. GitHub still has no tags and no releases. The README says the tree is synced from the SpaceXAI monorepo, and a SOURCE_REV file records the internal commit. The last public commit at intake is 19d42e35c07a (19 August 2026), message "Synced from monorepo".

If you installed it the usual way, you ran curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash. That script is not a git checkout. The dated operator channel is the changelog, which at intake topped at v1.0.5 on 15 August 2026, four days before the last public sync.

Name which of those three you are talking about.

Operator Stance / as of 2026-08-21

Use it for: Teams that want a first-party xAI terminal agent they can actually open in an editor, and anyone comparing inspectable CLIs with a frontier-lab vendor loop. Headless `grok -p` and native ACP (`grok agent stdio`) are the surfaces worth a first look.
Avoid it for: Anyone who needs to prove that yesterday's public SHA is today's binary. There are no GitHub tags. The default install is a moving script. A permission you read at a commit is not, by itself, the permission the install script shipped.
Watch next: Whether a tag or a digest ever joins SOURCE_REV to a changelog version; whether public main stays a lagging mirror; whether ACP from a wrapper and Grok Build's own tool policy disagree.

Why it is here

xAI trains the model and ships the harness. That is the bracket Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI already occupy, and this row was the gap.

Unlike Claude Code, the loop is readable. Unlike Codex, the readable tree is a mirror with no tag an operator can pin. DeepSeek Harness has the same shape of question: is the public repo the home, or a window into a private one?

Native ACP is grok agent stdio. Other tools can drive that socket. Omnigent already does. A wrap is not Grok Build's own gate.

What to do with it

Read a permission or a hook at a pinned SHA if you need to know how the code is written. Then check grok --version against the changelog before you treat that SHA as the thing on PATH. If those disagree, the changelog and the binary win for "what shipped," and the SHA wins for "what the mirror currently contains."

Verification

open source commits / evidence floor: official changelog / updated 2026-08-21

Open Questions

Which Channel Is The Product
Public Tree Is A Monorepo Mirror

Source policy: what Frontier watches and accepts as evidence

Edited and maintained by Bitter Frontier.

View source on GitHub