I have been a fan of Grok for a long time now.. I endured the lack of a CLI when every other provider offered it. I saw how it was not included originally with CLI tools providers like Cursor for a long time too.
Then they released Grok Build and a CLI tool. I like it.. I am not thrilled with the usage quota options and the billing felt very odd at the start (I posted about that before) but better once it opened it up to Supergrok users. Now of X bought Cursor, so now Grok basically has 2 CLI tools. Never feels like a smart business move to have 2 competing products under your own roof, so clearly one of these will fade away, time will tell. I think now that GrokBot it gaining acceptance Grok Build CLI will likely go away, sucks that is the one I like.
So ... I agree with Elon in some regards as well "Grok is falling behind" and frankly a little all over the place but the falling behind part of me.. is when you release a product that cannot even work with your other products.
I spent some time today trying to use Grok Bot like the pitch says you can: as an AI employee that sits on a computer, opens a browser, and does the work.
xAI’s own pages say it plainly:
“Grok Bot is your team of always-on agents. They have their own computer, work inside tools and apps like you do, and keep working 24/7.” — https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot
“AI teammates you can give real work to. Bots can sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work.” — https://x.ai/bot
So I gave it real work.
The test was simple. Generate short vertical videos of a consistent AI character in Grok Imagine. The character has a reference id. You put that reference in the prompt. The face locks. You hit generate.
Without that reference, you get a random character. Tokens burn. The take is useless.
So the real job was not “write a good prompt.” The real job was: put the reference in the box.
What worked when I did it myself
I can paste this into Imagine and it works:
Adult character reference @1fd6abc-xxxxxxx...
When I paste it by hand, Grok keeps the reference. The face locks. Generation is usable.
Settings were never the hard part. Video. 720p. 6 seconds. 9:16. The bot could flip those toggles fine.
What failed when the bot did it
Every automated attempt to put that same reference into the same box failed.
- Typing the
@id into the field stripped it. The box left the prompt with no reference. - Typing bare
@opened the wrong picker (“No attachments to reference”). - Putting the full prompt on the OS clipboard and pasting with Ctrl+V also stripped the
@id. Same result: text without the reference, no chip, no lock.
So I even used Grok Bot to audit the failure. Populate only. No Submit. Screenshot the box.
Result: fail. Clipboard held the full string with the id. After automated paste, the id was gone.
I can populate the form. The bot cannot.
Why that is a product failure
If your product is “AI teammate,” the bar is not clever chat.
The bar is: open the tool the job needs, fill the field that makes the job real, and keep going.
Grok Bot can talk about scenes. It can rewrite prompts. It can argue about camera physics. It can hand me paste-ready text so I do the one step that matters.
That is not a teammate. That is an idea generator with a desktop.
An assistant that cannot put a reference into a form — especially a form on the same company’s Imagine product — is not ready for the job it is sold as.
What I learned the hard way
- Prompt quality and form control are different skills. I got good prompts out of the loop. I did not get generation.
- “It works when I paste” is not the same as “the agent can paste.” Manual success hid an automation gap.
- Settings success is a fake green light. Toggles worked. The one token that mattered did not survive.
- If the agent can’t lock identity, it can’t ship character content. Everything else is theater.
What I expect next
I am not asking for magic video.
I am asking for the boring thing: reliably insert a character reference into Grok Imagine so it stays there as a locked reference, then submit when told.
I am asking for the tool to be able to work with the company’s own tools before I trust it to do anything more.
Until that works, call it what it is. A writing assistant with a browser. Not an AI teammate.
