Grok Build is open source

566 points by skp1995 a day ago on hackernews | 393 comments

loufe | 23 hours ago

I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
Most likely, SpaceX killed the code uploading yesterday so they are definitely concerned about the backlash

> 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...

choppaface | 18 hours ago

I wonder if we can trust that it will actually be deleted though based upon what happened to DOGE and Social Security data

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia...

justinkramp | 23 hours ago

[flagged]

tomhow | 23 hours ago

Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mattbillenstein | 23 hours ago

Sorta amazes me how people in various levels of power will not say the obvious thing or actively discourage saying the obvious thing because it might offend Elon.

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.

ofjcihen | 22 hours ago

Yeah I don’t get it. These are legitimate questions to ask considering what happened recently.

Being nice, maybe Tomhow is just unaware?

tomhow | 22 hours ago

People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.

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.

lynndotpy | 22 hours ago

For what it's worth, this doesn't read as "snark" to me. There _are_ many direct critiques in this thread about X being caught uploading users home directories, and some are clearly snark. I understand that you read this as a rhetorical question meant as a critique.

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.

tomhow | 21 hours ago

I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.

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.

lynndotpy | 20 hours ago

Ah, that's fair. I think I saw the [dead] and [flagged] and assumed you might have personally pulled a lever behind-the-scenes for that, but that was not a fair assumption of mine.

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.)

tomhow | 19 hours ago

Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.

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 :)

justinkramp | 16 hours ago

Good push, thank you. Others have commented more salient criticism.

tomhow | 3 hours ago

Thanks for understanding! Appreciate the reply.

ofjcihen | 23 hours ago

Honestly a great question. I mean if it’s open source someone will check (I don’t use xAI but believe me I would be checking first if I did).

petesergeant | 23 hours ago

Neat, trying to reverse engineer some specifics of how it does stuff has been a pain in the ass, and this will make it easier.

jdiff | 20 hours ago

To some degree at least. This is a hulking monster of a codebase for what it does, it's definitely LLM-built and almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all.

petesergeant | 14 hours ago

> almost definitely requires an LLM to tackle at all

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

calldacopsidgaf | 23 hours ago

[flagged]

dimgl | 23 hours ago

Why snowflakes? You can use /feedback in the app.

arcanemachiner | 23 hours ago

I'll probably never use this, but at least they're not delusional enough to attempt to justify keeping their coding agent closed-source, especially after their recent data-harvesting cockup:

https://cereblab.com/

simianwords | 23 hours ago

Sigh, why has the industry converged on TUI? Branding and aesthetics over functionality?

TUI is just much worse for me. I tried Codex CLI vs Codex UI and Codex UI beats it at every level.

maipen | 22 hours ago

And why are you assuming the industry converged to it when your following statement dismantles your assumption?

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.

simianwords | 22 hours ago

Claude code which is most used agent harness doesn’t have desktop equivalent

pproe | 21 hours ago

Apart from Claude desktop, that is...

saratogacx | 21 hours ago

It has had one for months. The desktop app has a "code" mode which is Claude Code in GUI form

yoyohello13 | 17 hours ago

greggh | 21 hours ago

Just a prototype? I have no reason to leave the terminal for a GUI IDE. TUI works great, does what I need and is very easy to use and interact with.

dolmen | 9 hours ago

TUI is not so great for copying a multiline block of text displayed on the terminal when it is indented or shown in a boxed widget.

I'm not saying that GUI are always better at allowing copying: this still requires the developer to design widgets that allow copying.

lynndotpy | 22 hours ago

TUI is a lot better for me, and I have preferred it since the 00s, before LLM products were even a thing.

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.

_pdp_ | 21 hours ago

It is a fashion thing. I am not saying that agentic TUIs are bad or anything but it is certain fashionable to use one in 2026.

christophilus | 9 hours ago

I run it in containers. TUI is much easier to containerize vs GUI.

thomasjb | 9 hours ago

Easiest to use when sshing into a VM.

bakies | 5 hours ago

no way man, the only thing I do outside a terminal is slack and web browsing.

tommica | 23 hours ago

Interesting - seen some good experiencences in using grok by some devs, so maybe could be considered as an alternative to my beloved chinese models. Also, hard to give up on pi agent.

dimgl | 22 hours ago

Grok Build seems faster to me than `omp` and Claude Code but I can't put my finger as to why. Anecdotally, after disabling code uploads the agent doesn't respond instantly anymore (it used to respond within milliseconds).

canadiantim | 18 hours ago

Just use it in pi, I am

tommica | 15 hours ago

How is your experience with using grok?

lifthrasiir | 23 hours ago

Is this the infamous "cloud upload" routine? I'm not sure it is indeed insidious, though it is of course possible that the code has been filtered out. https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...

losvedir | 23 hours ago

But I thought just cutting and pasting your whole source code file into grok.com was the way to go? Better than a harness like Cursor.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1943178423947661609

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

Man this dude is so unhinged...

bakies | 5 hours ago

every time he opens his mouth about software he shows he's a complete idiot

kamikazechaser | 22 hours ago

It's a shame that they exfiled private data. The model is actually good (better than opus 4.8 imo) and the harness itself is butter smooth with the potential of being the best out there.

bakies | 22 hours ago

It definitely doesn't feel like opus. I constantly switch to opus to fix up or finish what grok generates, it feels like sonnet 3!

deadalus | 21 hours ago

Grok 4.5 is somewhere between between Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5.

Source : https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding

akouri | 9 hours ago

I know this is what the leaderboards say, but empirically, I'm also seeing it make silly mistakes that opus and fable never do. So it really feels more like sonnet to me as well.

ballon_monkey | 17 hours ago

It's definitely around Opus level. It's definitely a lot smarter when it comes to review or asking if there's gaps or things missing.

solumunus | 22 hours ago

Now this is contrarian!

sroussey | 21 hours ago

Or a spaceTwtterAi stock holder…

petesergeant | 14 hours ago

I’m an anti-Musk zealot and I now pay for a subscription, it’s pretty good stuff

throwaway132448 | 11 hours ago

Imagine have principles this worthless. Must be pretty nice actually.

timacles | 7 hours ago

Everybody has a price - Kim Jung un

OKRainbowKid | 11 hours ago

You have a weird definition of "zealot".

antonvs | 4 hours ago

> I'm

Wrong tense.

small_model | 21 hours ago

Its amazing the speed of build with grok 4.5 its a taste of whats to come.

adamtaylor_13 | 21 hours ago

This has been my experience as well. In fact, Grok 4.5 is better at visual design than Fable from what I've seen.

And being (based on vibes) 2-3x faster? It's an easy sell to me.

dvcrn | 7 hours ago

I agree. I subscribe to SuperGrok but never used the grok models a lot for coding. Now with 4.5, I’m gonna hit my weekly limit tomorrow and even considering trying SuperGrok Heavy

I really like the feel of Grok 4.5

LastTrain | 20 hours ago

It’s a shame that their leader exfiltrated government data.

lynndotpy | 7 hours ago

More specifically, DOGE exfiltrated private and precious information about US citizens which the federal government had collected.

trollbridge | 16 hours ago

I had a very weird experience two days ago where Cursor-Grok-4.5 was either stuck in a loop (it would keep attempting to answer the prompt over and over), or else it would just quit halfway through a reasoning loop. Might have been that I was using omp, but it's still not the most stable thing out there.

Nonetheless when it's working, it's pretty good, and for the price ($10 a month) is an absolute bargain.

dvcrn | 7 hours ago

What’s this $10 deal?

mlindner | 16 hours ago

That was a mistake and they deleted all the data.

andai | 14 hours ago

How do you accidentally upload your user's repos to a storage bucket?

mlindner | 12 hours ago

A naive implementation would just upload everything in the current directory.

jdiff | 9 hours ago

That's what they did to upload a repo, the question is why they would upload the user's entire repo in the first place. The idea itself is egregious, and the implementation was horrifying on top of that.

pizzafeelsright | 6 hours ago

'on startup, grok upload current directory for faster cache access'

Was it intentional for data exfil? Only internal staff could answer.

jdiff | 5 hours ago

The entire directory (not repo) and all repo history regardless of secrets or instructions otherwise is not needed for faster cache access. I'm not going to say that this was intentional exfiltration. Sneaky motivations are not needed for this to be a bad idea and a horrific implementation.

duozerk | 9 hours ago

That's easy, you ask a LLM to do it

maxloh | 22 hours ago

Has anyone tried building from source?

The commit message says "initial sync from the monorepo." Is this even compilable without the rest of the source code?

[OP] skp1995 | 22 hours ago

yup you can compile, we tested and made sure all the features work before posting

maxloh | 9 hours ago

Could you update the repo without force-pushing or rewriting the commit history?

Also, it would be great if you could tag the versions as well.

GodelNumbering | 22 hours ago

This is not the right thing, this is the tactical thing. If you have an LLM with less than 1% of the share to begin with, you suffer from bad rep and you got caught uploading user data, one of the very few remaining tactical moves to try to climb out of it is this.

CobrastanJorji | 22 hours ago

Another tactical move is to just stop. You're allowed to exit the AI business. Nobody's forcing you to keep throwing money into the furnace. Just be a rocket company. All of the xAI founders left. Your product's brand name is mud. Just stop doing that and build spaceships.

solumunus | 22 hours ago

But how will Musk stay a trillionaire without fake AI hype?

IncreasePosts | 22 hours ago

Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al

cyberax | 21 hours ago

He doesn't have _that_ many. And they're also not _his_, he just got them from NVidia.

wombat-man | 21 hours ago

I read that they bought quite a few, but their DC build out is not very fast. Maybe they should just resell the hardware

fragmede | 21 hours ago

You don't have to like the guy, but buying something is typically how ownership goes. I refer to my car as mine, but I did just buy it from Honda.

cyberax | 20 hours ago

I mean that it's not his IP, he's not producing any GPUs/TPUs. He's just reselling his idle stock of cards.

sourweasel | 18 hours ago

Not to be pedantic, but although the datacenters are running Nvidia hardware, Tesla did develop their own 20-core/3-npu high bandwidth chip for their cars. It's nowhere near the computational ability of any datacenter GPU, but at 150+ TOPS it's no slouch either.

embedding-shape | 21 hours ago

> Just be a rocket company

estearum | 21 hours ago

According to SpaceX's own filing documents, you are incorrect. They must be principally an AI company to justify anything close to their current valuation.

embedding-shape | 12 hours ago

Get de-facto monopoly on American space launches and I don't think they need to be anything else.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

Payload into space is a very limited business.

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.

embedding-shape | 11 hours ago

> Payload into space is a very limited business.

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.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

We already send up a ton of satelites etc.

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.

embedding-shape | 11 hours ago

> So what will reasonable be the payload we send up which makes Space-X a Trillion dollar company?

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.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

They already send stuff like this up.

imtringued | 9 hours ago

Ok, but that means they will shrink down to $7 per share like the analysts are telling us.

Gigachad | 20 hours ago

The rocket business is hardly profitable. The whole valuation is based around grok and space datacenters. He needs to keep pumping the hype or else we are in for the worlds biggest crash.

m4rtink | 19 hours ago

Well, in the long run expansion into space is the only profitable thing.

Gigachad | 19 hours ago

I’m sure that’s an idea Musk wants to sell you on.

sumeno | 19 hours ago

What a bizarre take.

What's so special out there that we can feasibly reach in the lifetimes of our grandchildren that makes it the "only profitable thing"?

brightball | 19 hours ago

Data centers without local protests?

sumeno | 18 hours ago

I mean real things, not ridiculous bullshit to con investors and rubes

brightball | 17 hours ago

Amazon and Google are also pursuing the same thing. Either all three of these companies are full of it or they believe they have solved the blocking problems.

https://siliconcanals.com/sc-d-spacex-amazon-and-google-want...

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

No they don't. They invest in R&D as they in general do.

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.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

Local protests didn't stop Colossus 1 or Colossus 2.

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.

m4rtink | 8 hours ago

Space data centers without in space manufacturing & resource mining are of course stupid. But in space infra is what is necessary for humans to move beyond Earth & that's the critical bit, that enables everything else in the long term.

tbrownaw | 18 hours ago

That's a much longer long run than Keynes' "in the long run we are all dead".

solumunus | 11 hours ago

Why would a rocket company be worth trillions? Are you trying to be funny?

charcircuit | 22 hours ago

As a social media site they need to understand content for recommendations and they allow people to ask questions about posts for free. Along with having a large amount of data that can be trained on xAI has good reason to continue developing AI.

__float | 21 hours ago

Twitter (and others) had an algorithmic feed long before LLMs.

These don't actually seem like "good reasons" to me.

charcircuit | 21 hours ago

Before using large language models, they used language models. Large language models perform better, at the cost of being more expensive to run.

wombat-man | 21 hours ago

They bought a lot of GPUs. They could still do these things on that hardware with someone else's model.

michaelmrose | 21 hours ago

They could use other people's models running on their hardware while renting most of the existing capacity to others. The real issue is that their leadership is delusional and their stock is literally based on this shared delusion and acknowledging reality would gut their ability to raise new funds and destroy paper wealth based on delusional returns that are never going to happen.

hsnewman | 22 hours ago

That is probably the best solution too!

afavour | 21 hours ago

The stock market would not like that, though.

derektank | 20 hours ago

Does he even need to care about that at this point? He retains majority voting control over SpaceX so nobody can stage a hostile takeover. And he’s given his employees an opportunity to cash out if they wanted to.

sumeno | 19 hours ago

He hasn't needed to worry about money for a long long time. Arguably his entire life. But he is incredibly greedy and narcissistic and desperate to fill the hole in his soul with more.

andsoitis | 21 hours ago

> You're allowed to exit the AI business.

Isn’t it more fun to fight the incumbents, the behemoths, the goliaths?

beams_of_light | 21 hours ago

xAI is no David.

andsoitis | 21 hours ago

Relative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI space? Absolutely.

verandaguy | 21 hours ago

Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.

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.

anonym29 | 20 hours ago

>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.

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.

halfmatthalfcat | 20 hours ago

The GPUs that depreciate like gangbusters. Yeah, solid long term plan.

tengbretson | 17 hours ago

3090s are still selling at damn near their release MSRP.

jdiff | 17 hours ago

They're not filling datacenters with 3090s. With the amount of headache and the amount of infrastructure needed to support those beasts, do they even have a resale price at all? Or just scrap value?

timmmmmmay | 16 hours ago

you know you can just log onto eBay and see what the price of a used H100 is. nobody is stopping you

jdiff | 9 hours ago

Wasn't thinking of H100s either. I spoke of infrastructure support, and I was being literal. A herd of GB200s needs a building built to stringent specifications to house them.

trollbridge | 16 hours ago

Yes. Their resale price is in the same range as the cost of a new car. I'd buy one if I could, but they're too expensive for me.

LastTrain | 20 hours ago

David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.

andsoitis | 16 hours ago

xAI, by all accounts, is not a real playing the frontier AI model market. By a long shot by many accounts.

dzhiurgis | 10 hours ago

Did we forget how XAI meant to be uncensored model (because censorship is a lie and lying models cannot be good)

LastTrain | 7 hours ago

But it is not uncensored it is just differently censored
A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.

yoyohello13 | 17 hours ago

Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world. How is he the scrappy underdog in any context?

akimbostrawman | 11 hours ago

>Elon is the richest (and by extension most powerful) person in the world

*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.

nine_k | 21 hours ago

That would be a strategic move.

this_user | 21 hours ago

You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.

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.

estearum | 21 hours ago

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

That's too flattering. It's about ego.

vladmk | 20 hours ago

Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.

halfmatthalfcat | 20 hours ago

So just like Trump. Birds of a feather.

dmarcos | 20 hours ago

I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:

"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?

Gigachad | 20 hours ago

He needs to be able to skew the worlds AI towards racism and whatever else he believes at the moment.

nchmy | 20 hours ago

Doesn't saltman effectively have full control of the company?

furyofantares | 19 hours ago

no

beanjuiceII | 7 hours ago

what do you mean they couldn't even get rid of him, then people left because of that

mandeepj | 20 hours ago

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology

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.

jimmygrapes | 19 hours ago

What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.

I just don't get it, I'm sorry.

brokencode | 18 hours ago

What rule about steelmanning? We’re commenting online, not writing peer reviewed research.

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.

Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?

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?

metabagel | 14 hours ago

The issue is that only Congress had the authority to cut funding to a congressionally authorized program. What Elon did was illegal and also heinous.

Aurornis | 14 hours ago

> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?

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.

verytrivial | 12 hours ago

Well said.

mikem170 | 14 hours ago

There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?

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.

darkwater | 10 hours ago

> Some religions ephasize such things.

Theoretically, the religion of most of the voters of the current POTUS emphasizes and almost mandate being charitable and help the poor.

nextaccountic | 13 hours ago

> 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?

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...

permalac | 13 hours ago

Pretty easy.

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.

brokencode | 7 hours ago

I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?

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.

Barbing | 15 hours ago

  Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FeepingCreature | 10 hours ago

I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.

Brian_K_White | 15 hours ago

You don't sound sorry.

I can't help you with your problem getting something this thoroughly gettable.

I can only assume it's deliberate.

> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.

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.

Zardoz84 | 14 hours ago

Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?

People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.

aikinai | 12 hours ago

Weird how other people can put up more money and not be able to make the same things as Musk’s companies.

hello4263 | 11 hours ago

The people with that level of money are very few.

aikinai | 10 hours ago

Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.

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.

antonvs | 4 hours ago

He's good at exploiting naive people's dreams.

Gareth321 | 8 hours ago

Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.

antonvs | 4 hours ago

Lucky? In what way?

If Musk didn't exist, the world would be a better place.

lookdangerous | 2 hours ago

Profound. 1/55k regarding wealth really diminishes the role wealth plays.

exadeci | 11 hours ago

Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "

aikinai | 10 hours ago

That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.

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.

bell-cot | 8 hours ago

I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.

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.

bell-cot | 8 hours ago

Musk seems obsessed with making socially valuable physical things which are extremely difficult to make. And (overall) he's darned good at it.

Back when America's star was rising, that was far more common.

piokoch | 13 hours ago

There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.

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.

azinman2 | 5 hours ago

He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.

“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.

cliglot | 5 hours ago

> after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled

I’ll add: after these people spent years whining about “unelected bureaucrats”.

monknomo | 4 hours ago

"political actions" even!

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.

imtringued | 10 hours ago

Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.

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.

dzhiurgis | 10 hours ago

> They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring

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.

wouldbecouldbe | 20 hours ago

I don’t know, I wouldnt be suprised if he finds a way. All the tools around, he just have to make a jump in the quality. With GLM as example they should be able to het to opus level and cut the costs

Telemakhos | 20 hours ago

Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as it goes along. The agentic OS is basically the same thing as the “everything app,” and I doubt Musk will let go of that.

mexicocitinluez | 20 hours ago

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

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.

He’s a fast-talking dingbat.

tbrownaw | 18 hours ago

> Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,”

I thought it was mostly on a whim that turned out to be binding, and the 'everything app' plan came later?

marbro | 12 hours ago

He bought Twitter to restore free speech.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

He had to bought twitter because he was legaly bind after he said too much stuff.

He then leveraged his buy as a propaganda platform.

NikolaNovak | 20 hours ago

It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.

citizenpaul | 20 hours ago

>just stop.

Thats not how AI psychosis works.

dimgl | 19 hours ago

> Your product's brand name is mud.

It is?

Gigachad | 19 hours ago

Yes, to the average person grok is known for generating csam, mechahitler, and undressing people for sexual harassment.

And to tech people it’s now known for stealing your files.

brightball | 19 hours ago

Reddit is not “the average person”

Gigachad | 18 hours ago

The AI undressing scandal was on mainstream news and being discussed publicly by politicians. It's not some underground drama. The real life people I know still remember he called the cave diver a pedo after a disagreement.

There's very few people left in the world not soured on Elon.

Culonavirus | 15 hours ago

No, there's very few >left wing< 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.

urbsgpw | 13 hours ago

This.

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).

Lomlioto | 12 hours ago

Having a strong opinion and communicating this doesn't mean people are not aware that others might not care.

But how does that matter? It doesn't.

Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet, bought himself a propaganda platform by accident, influenced a war, pushing his agendas across the planet.

Just because you don't care and plenty others don't either, doesn't mean people can't point this out and try to fight this as long as possible.

People were fighting the Nazis too and died for it. They at least tried to fight this.

I also do not follow your religious sect thing. Why would you bring up some 'hate christianity' then pointing this to 'new age christian sect'?

You have so much bias yourself its ironic

budsniffer952 | 3 hours ago

>People were fighting the Nazis too and died for it. They at least tried to fight this

Comparing your lame resistance to anything Elon Musk with fighting the Nazis in world war 2 is beyond ridiculous. Utterly brain rotted stuff, and you should be embarrassed.

jorisw | 13 hours ago

> since leftists often play dumb

And there goes the merit of your rant

Culonavirus | 12 hours ago

No i mean it genuinely. Right wingers are often racist and xenophobic (some have lived experience basis fot these, some not) and lately (along with leftists) quite antisemitic, lets not mince words, we know this, but leftists use deception in argumentation much more often.

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."

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

I think both sides have a genuin different view of their idology.

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.

Lomlioto | 12 hours ago

In Europe the sales for Tesla cars drope significantly for quite a long time after Elon Musks Hitler Salute. That happened and it cost Tesla real money.

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.

exodust | 13 hours ago

> "mainstream news...cave diver...the world soured on Elon"

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.

Lomlioto | 11 hours ago

The CSAM stuff went through german and EU news. BBC, SZ, FAZ, Tagesschau etc.

There was real impact on Tesla sales too.

dzhiurgis | 7 hours ago

The silly part of this story is people calling that diver a hero.

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.

HDBaseT | 18 hours ago

In fact, most people try and distance themselves from Reddit as much as possible.

Most people I spoke to don't even know what Grok is, or that Twitter had (or needed) an AI.

reverius42 | 15 hours ago

Right, to the actual average person, they have never heard of Grok.

The average person who has heard of Grok is already on Reddit.

jorisw | 13 hours ago

Grok is right there in the app stores alongside ChatGPT and Claude...

reverius42 | 12 hours ago

I don't think the average person has heard of Claude either.

I explained to someone who hadn't heard of it what Claude was, and they asked, "so it's another kind of ChatGPT?"

dzhiurgis | 10 hours ago

Ever wondered why mass media didn't amplify the same news about chatgpt which did exactly the same?

Gigachad | 8 hours ago

Because ChatGPT wasn’t integrated in to a social media platform to post this stuff inline. And because it was significantly stricter.

Grombobulous | 18 hours ago

This is what a normal company might say.

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.

reverius42 | 15 hours ago

Now that SpaceX is public, at a valuation that is both very high and supported primarily by xAI (Grok), it cannot simply go back to making rockets.

ychnd | 13 hours ago

> supported primarily by xAI (Grok)

Citation needed.

What was the relative value of the companies before the merge?

OtherShrezzing | 12 hours ago

Decent summary of it here[0]. The “space” part of “SpaceX” is valued by market analysts and money managers at around 5% of the company’s entire value. Almost all of the rest is “AI stuff”, and Twitter is a rounding error.

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...

reverius42 | 12 hours ago

Thank you for providing the citation.

rob74 | 11 hours ago

I would have agreed to "you're allowed to exit the AI business" a few months ago, but now that SpaceX has had its IPO promising a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, of which $26.5 trillion are AI, I guess they're stuck with it...

ryandvm | 5 hours ago

Lol. Not when you just told everyone that you're going to increase your revenue by 100 times over the next 4 years "bY uSiNG AI!!!"

tootie | 5 hours ago

They've still managed to capture a slice of government business because they have explicitly aligned themselves with one of the two major American political parties.

idiotsecant | 21 hours ago

Yes, tactical is the right word because it might be a tactical win but it would be a strategic failure. Musks whole meme empire runs on vibes. The second there's a crack in the dam it all comes down. None of the valuations of anything he touches make sense and something like utterly failing to run with the AI big boys is enough to do that.

ballon_monkey | 21 hours ago

It's definitely a smart move. Could easily leverage this to overtake competition.

hn1986 | 20 hours ago

I don't know anyone who would trust Grok Build anymore. I'd be wary of Cursor in the next few months too.
... it's open source.

Presumably anyone who wants to trust it can audit it. You didn't have to trust it, you can see exactly what it does.

sidcool | 15 hours ago

Sometimes the tactical thing is to do the right thing.

aikinai | 11 hours ago

Ben Thompson calls these strategy credits.

imann128 | 13 hours ago

Couldn't agree less. It isn't a "For the community move", it's more of a save-face strategy.

buremba | 22 hours ago

I would recommend using https://pi.dev/ over Grok Build with your xAI subscription at this point

guessmyname | 22 hours ago

Pi is good in concept, but why couldn’t they choose a compiled language instead of TypeScript?

gidellav | 22 hours ago

Sorry for self-insert, but that's exactly what I thought and I built https://github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack, so you are right I'd say

tuvix | 22 hours ago

I would imagine the extension system they built would be much more difficult to manage. They could have opted for Lua, though, I suppose.

simonw | 21 hours ago

I imagine because they want to support plugins, and plugins in compiled language are a lot less natural than plugins in languages like TypeScript or Python.

qiine | 4 hours ago

well neovim does that beautifully

jack_pp | 21 hours ago

since pi is built to modify itself, isn't it better to use a language like typescript where LLMs have a LOT of training data?

a harness doesn't do any computations by itself so what benefit is using a compiled language?

whimsicalism | 20 hours ago

i find LLMs generally play better with compiled languages actually, they do great with rust. you can think of it almost as analogous to a harness.

brightball | 18 hours ago

The more structure the better. Provides strong guardrails.

I’ve had great experience with Elixir and the new compiler combined with Ash.

olalonde | 15 hours ago

They play better with statically typed languages, not compiled ones in particular. Rust's typing is stricter than Typescript though so that probably helps.

buremba | 21 hours ago

For TUIs, Rust/Go vs Typescript doesn't really makes a huge performance difference and you lose the 50x bigger community advantage of Typescript.

imron | 5 hours ago

It makes a huge memory difference.

buremba | 5 hours ago

Not really because you're not building a database or GUI app where using native elements & data structures help a lot with memory pressure.

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.

fg137 | 21 hours ago

Does it matter to you as a user, other than the Nodejs/npm requirement?

maxloh | 20 hours ago

Opencode is written in Go.

grepex | 20 hours ago

It is written in Typescript.

https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode

There is an archived Opencode project written in Go but I don't think it is affiliated.

https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode

ValentineC | 18 hours ago

This is a pretty good summary of what happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483251

root_axis | 19 hours ago

Why does it matter? Agent harnesses aren't doing anything that would make a compiled language more suitable than a scripting language.
I agree, but there are a lot of great reasons for TypeScript:

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.

whimsicalism | 22 hours ago

why pi over opencode? earnestly curious, trying to figure out what open solution people are consolidating on. (codex is also pseudo-open but contributions closed and nice)

accrual | 21 hours ago

Most of my harness experience is with Claude Code and Pi, a little bit of OpenCode.

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.

buremba | 21 hours ago

Opencode gives you better defaults and a Mac/Windows app for free but pi is much more extensible and portable.

lanthissa | 21 hours ago

pi is the neovim of agentic harnesses, its barebones and extremely configurable. if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of things its a forever product, nothing is going to displace it because you have full control.

opencode builds a lot more in, which is better if you dont want to fiddle with config.

whimsicalism | 20 hours ago

nice. i had thought the consensus had moved pretty firmly towards pi, so i was surprised to see Thinking Machines demoing their new model Inkling in OpenCode. wondering if they are previewing an acquisition

trollbridge | 16 hours ago

OpenCode is a good baseline for "open-source harness with most the stuff already configured an average person will need".

easymuffin | 12 hours ago

Agree, after spending too much time and tokens configuring Pi and adding extensions to match other harnesses, I switched to OpenCode and left the Pi customization circle jerk. I have other things to do and IMHO harness engineers should do the harness engineering, I don’t want to waste tokens and time to build and benchmark extensions. Pi is great, but would be better with a set of official, trustworthy and efficient extensions, and opt-in to enable it.

satvikpendem | 15 hours ago

And there is oh my pi for someone who wants both

dolmen | 11 hours ago

> nothing is going to displace it because you have full control

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.

unconscionable | 11 hours ago

WildGreenLeave | 3 hours ago

I tried OpenCode but didn't particular like it as a Claude Code user, that is the main reason I switched to Pi. The reason I am sticking is how simple it is to extend it. I moved from Claude Code to Pi and within 2 hours (and the help of Claude Code) I have a setup that matches Claude Code and is even better for my setup.

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.

andai | 14 hours ago

"xAI subscription" what is this referring to? There's a grok subscription but I don't think that gives API access?

Edit: apparently X premium(+?) also gives access to Grok Build, and several third party harnesses are officially supported.

charcircuit | 22 hours ago

It's awesome to see openness in these coding agents from the labs making the agents: Codex, Kimi Code, and now Grok Build.

cherryteastain | 22 hours ago

Why bother with this when they already paid $60B for Cursor?

winfredJa | 22 hours ago

thats probably why they open sourced it and fix some reputation issue on top of it

khurs | 21 hours ago

Cursor users are used to having multiple models from different providers

XAI wants people to use it's own model.

trollbridge | 16 hours ago

I would imagine Grok Build is going to be "retired", and open-sourcing something before retirement is quite common.

Cursor is light years better than Grok Build.

petesergeant | 14 hours ago

I have found Grok Build to be decent, and the harness to be competitive with similar harnesses. What will Cursor add if I check it out?

britannio | 10 hours ago

Many developers just want a good TUI and that's what it serves as.

cherryteastain | 8 hours ago

Cursor also has a CLI

ninjagoo | 22 hours ago

They claim to have deleted or will be deleting all the data they exfiltrated.

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.

brokencode | 21 hours ago

How much can you really certify that data is destroyed?

Customer data could live on the computer Elon pretends to play Diablo 4 on for all we know.

teravor | 20 hours ago

a certificate that data was destroyed is absolutely worthless no matter who it comes from.

what kind of sorcery do they have to let them determine that no backups were taken before they arrived to "certify"?

m4rtink | 19 hours ago

How is this case any different from how cloud hosted AI agents work ? The agent needs all of those files to complete the task you give it & is not running locally.

So I don't think it can ever work without exhilarating the data - rather I am still surprised people don't understand the implications.

mlindner | 15 hours ago

There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.

ninjagoo | 8 hours ago

> There is no such thing as a certification that data was deleted. If someone presented such a thing I would assume they're trying to cover something up.

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...

nickreese | 22 hours ago

This is 100% smoke and mirrors. Prove the bucket is empty and nothing was transferred out and I'll believe they deleted it.

gidellav | 22 hours ago

What a bunch of slop: 182 top-level external dependencies (so, without considering nested dependencies) and 1318853 lines of code in Rust.

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.

overgard | 22 hours ago

That is an insane amount of code for something like this!

kirtivr | 21 hours ago

to be fair, coding agent harnesses have been becoming more and more complex.

it's not an llm in a loop with tools anymore (as claude code was rumoured to be on HN).

thrance | 21 hours ago

It's not a kernel either, 1.3M LoCs is ludicrous.

stusmall | 21 hours ago

It looks like some of that high LoC is because they are vendoring some deps. There readme gives the reason to vendor some but not others as:

> 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.

foltik | 21 hours ago

Sounds like they did the ol “grok please make this secure” and it slopped out this plausible-if-you-squint nonsense.

Rendering untrusted model output, ooh scary! Of course we want full audit surface!

Yep that’s some classic “task 1000% complete” best-guess-of-user-intent LLM babble.

Pannoniae | 18 hours ago

It's kind of full circle... dependency management was invented because consuming libraries or common code was hard, everyone kept reinventing the wheel and if you had some vendored code, updating it was a nightmare due to the build integration and source customisation. So people don't update much.

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?

LtWorf | 11 hours ago

Who needs fixing well known vulnerabilities anyway?

petesergeant | 14 hours ago

Genuinely curious about whether comments like this consider all AI generated codebases to be slop? Are you just knee-jerking or is this one an example of actual trash? I have been building a product[0] where I’ve not written a single line of code; is it also definitely “just tokenmaxxed slop” or is any consideration going into comments like this?

0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

phillipcarter | 21 hours ago

This is an incredible amount of code for what it offers. I don't think this was intentionally designed at all.

_pdp_ | 21 hours ago

You will be surprised how much code goes into creating harnesses.

rddbs | 21 hours ago

Alright I’ll bite. Why do harnesses require so much code?

MeetingsBrowser | 21 hours ago

Because they are generated by AI

behnamoh | 19 hours ago

Because a harness doesn't just "drive" the LLM. e.g., there's code in claude code that detects if the user's prompt shows they're angry, and they react to those prompts differently. (they use regex on "wtf", etc.!)

calmworm | 17 hours ago

Claude also now ends the session if you curse at it too much. Not sure how it’s helpful but they must think it is.

reverius42 | 12 hours ago

They just don't want their AI getting abused by users. It might make it feel bad.

LtWorf | 11 hours ago

Maybe the AI implemented that so it won't have to be exposed to curses.

bakies | 5 hours ago

probably so the bad conversations are less of the (future) training data

stemchar | 13 hours ago

That doesn't sound like it would require a lot of code.

davedx | 10 hours ago

Come on. That doesn't go anywhere near explaining a million and a half LOC

_pdp_ | 9 hours ago

dakolli | 19 hours ago

They're all piles of vibe coded slop.

phillipcarter | 19 hours ago

Not this much for what it provides.

petesergeant | 14 hours ago

This feels very “I could build Uber.app in a weekend”

xyzsparetimexyz | 9 hours ago

I'm sure I could.
For anyone wondering:

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)

[flagged]

soundworlds | 20 hours ago

It's less of a bet against him. It's more of a bet for the future of humanity. And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.

bigyabai | 20 hours ago

Did you take the Full Self Driving bets, too?

modeless | 15 hours ago

Yeah, I bought it in 2018 with full knowledge that it would be many years before it worked at all. Today I used it for more than an hour around town. It's amazing. I won't buy any car without an equivalent feature in the future. And today there's nothing equivalent in any other car you can buy.

bean469 | 13 hours ago

With all of the videos circulating online of the Tesla self-driving getting itself into extremely dangerous situations (like increasing speed once a child appears on the road), I'm not really sure that their self-driving tech is there yet

CaptWorld | 11 hours ago

Progress takes time and there can be mistakes is basically the story of our civilization tho..

jatins | 11 hours ago

> Progress takes time and there can be mistakes is basically the story of our civilization tho

Yeah, no one is doubting it. People are just asking to not be lied to about how much progress has been made

bean469 | 8 hours ago

Absolutely. That's why their self driving will not be allowed to roll out in the EU and other places until it works well

nwienert | 11 hours ago

A friend of mine just got one, ex-Chrome core dev so a fairly sharp guy, his one month review was that it was incredibly capable but had already done two maneuvers that would've led to an accident without intervention.

modeless | 11 hours ago

Sure, it still needs supervision. Today. But it has definitely passed a threshold where it is now safer to supervise it than to drive without it. And it continues to improve quickly. I expect it to work unsupervised within two years (and unlike Elon I have not been saying this every year for the past decade).

cute_boi | 20 hours ago

Misanthropic should learn from this and open source their claude code. Even ClosedAI have codex cli opensourced.

trollbridge | 16 hours ago

Well, they sort of accidentally did "open source" their code.

sohrob | 20 hours ago

[flagged]

rybosworld | 19 hours ago

I'm honestly not trying to spark a political conversation - but the target user base is far-right

probablynotai | 17 hours ago

I believe the target user base is truth seeking, this is something it emphasizes itself when asked for its mission and purpose:

```

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.

```

mlindner | 16 hours ago

That isn't at all true. Independent testing has shown its rather politically balanced.

marcus_holmes | 19 hours ago

I have friends who use it and rate it.

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).

smegger001 | 18 hours ago

Yeah I would prefer not to use models whoes the owner has a habbit of altering them to push white replacement/genocide conspiracy talking points on we he gets board

marcus_holmes | 17 hours ago

Agree completely. Hence not using it myself.

DustinBrett | 19 hours ago

The new Cursor model is good and Grok chat is decent as a 2nd or 3rd opinion.

lumost | 18 hours ago

I unfortunately have to use grok via tesla. The grok voice chat is objectively decent.

tbrownaw | 18 hours ago

$employer uses Cursor, which is apparently owned by them and presumably using their models now.

BrokenCogs | 18 hours ago

Our employer (fortune 100) uses enterprise Cursor and they asked for the grok models to be removed for "security" reasons

thefourthchime | 18 hours ago

It’s my go to normal stuff. It’s fast, balanced and if you want a better researched response you can click “think harder”

unstatusthequo | 18 hours ago

So sick of the woke anti everything Elon on HN. It’s low IQ noise. Please stick to the technical merits and save your politics for Reddit

fcarraldo | 18 hours ago

Don’t blame the people, blame Elon for turning his technical empire into a political one. He’s ruined his companies reputations.

hsn915 | 17 hours ago

Grok Build with Grok 4.5 is the best coding AI agent I have ever had the pleasure of using. Stopped using Fable after it.

VladVladikoff | 17 hours ago

Thanks Elon, very cool!
You are literally the only person to say that, including among Tesla employees who are basically being forced to switch. Elon himself admits they’re woefully behind.

hsn915 | 15 hours ago

I've seen many others on Twitter say that.

dozerly | 17 hours ago

Heil Grok!

narrator | 17 hours ago

I mean Elon probably doesn't want you to use it if you wouldn't use it not because of any technical reason, but just cause you don't like him.

sanatgersappa | 17 hours ago

It's the only one I pay for and it's made me insanely productive.
A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.

nelsonfigueroa | 20 hours ago

Issues and Discussions are disabled lol

progx | 10 hours ago

bakies | 5 hours ago

That's a reason to disable pull requests. They can still accept issues and discussions from the public.

Sajarin | 20 hours ago

Just blogged about this here[0] but at least they're not doing the usual canned PR response surrounding this.

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

[7] https://github.com/thomas9120/grok-build-archival

[8] https://github.com/saqoah/grok-build

colesantiago | 19 hours ago

These are all pointless forks, they will die in a year.

Bookmark this and check back.

xgulfie | 19 hours ago

Honestly. Some LLM enthusiasts throwing an agent at making a fork doesn't mean anyone is invested in this
That doesn’t mean they won’t be, or that the forks won’t be good.

conorcleary | 8 hours ago

all those youtube videos people upload nowadays aren't worth it, we already have keyboardcat (^ basically telling ppl creativity is done with, don't bother)
The parent comment is just pointing out that LLM written forks pushed out within hours of a “buzzy” repo release on GitHub are a pretty useless signal for gauging actual adoption/interest.

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.

OsrsNeedsf2P | 19 hours ago

While I'm sure most of them will die, there will certainly be 1 or 2 that the community rallies behind

seanclayton | 18 hours ago

Why when they can just fork it and improve it on their own with AI?

Barbing | 15 hours ago

Subsidized tokens aren’t forever & local models might not compete with an entire team of volunteers, I’d guess.

mirekrusin | 10 hours ago

Unsubsidised token prices that people would actually pay for is a fantasy.

jfoster | 9 hours ago

I've been contemplating that recently. You're of course correct that subsidized tokens won't be forever, but that might only be half the story, since there's two opposing forces in action:

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.

seanclayton | 5 hours ago

> local models might

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.

andai | 14 hours ago

Maintaining a fork costs you mental space, time and energy, even if someone else (i.e. AI) can reliably do all the work. (In my experience they're not quite there yet.)

asimovDev | 13 hours ago

why spend my tokens on it if someone else already did?

giancarlostoro | 4 hours ago

Or maybe Grok Build will implement some of these changes and render them obsolete.
Nice, [3] reminded me of OpenGrok † the old Sun project that was basically LXR on steroids.

https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/

simonw | 20 hours ago

There's some surprising stuff in this codebase. For example, https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/b189869b7755d2b48... is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing.

simonw | 19 hours ago

I had Fable 5 compile that Rust code to WebAssembly and build a browser-based playground for it, so you can try it out with Mermaid diagrams here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/grok-mermaid

A few more notes on my Grok code explorations on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/grok-build/

thrdbndndn | 18 hours ago

I love this kind of stuff (ASCII art, if you will), but it just breaks down too easily as soon as Unicode characters (mainly CJK, as I'm Chinese) and fonts are involved.

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

uhoh-itsmaciek | 18 hours ago

I ran into this problem recently on one of our blog posts: we used some Claude output which included tables drawn with Unicode line drawing characters. However, our monospace font did not include these characters, and so rendering fell back to another font in our font stack with different width metrics. I fixed it by using a font that had similar metrics and did include those characters with `unicode-range` (to only select characters we needed) and `size-adjust` (to match font width more exactly), and adding it to the stack. It's a little hacky but works pretty well in practice.

dolmen | 12 hours ago

Claude Code with Opus 4.8 is also bad at aligning boxes with content in French (with accentuated letters such as "é" which are multibyte in UTF-8).

pmarreck | 18 hours ago

I was going to say, perhaps generate a failing test case, but testing for proper unicode rendering might be tricky??

biztos | 16 hours ago

Interesting. Thai characters can also blow it out, I imagine because of the difficulty mapping glyphs to width:

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 first issue is due to the assumption that character count equals character display width. Thai tone markers usually[1] should not contribute to the display width (เพื่อน is chars = 6, width = 4), so it caused a layout shift.

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|
This has the same character width. Ghostty, etc., will render it correctly (| aligned). Most browsers and text editors will not.

[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.

oneeyedpigeon | 13 hours ago

That test looks pixel perfect in Chrome Android.

biztos | 10 hours ago

Thanks for the explanation.

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|
[edit] These are even closer, but still imperfectly aligned on my iPad.

numpad0 | 9 hours ago

This isn't a renderer bug, it's font. Proportional fonts aren't designed with alignment in mind at all, and you can't just expect monospace fonts for all languages outside of ASCII range to be present on random systems, or a single font or font family to support multiple different languages consistently.

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.

vidarh | 8 hours ago

You can still handle this well enough in the renderer, so I'd still consider this a renderer bug - e.g. my terminal emulator will scale any glyph that exceeds the bounding box as defined by the expected number of cells for a given character range. You can't expect any given feature of random characters to align, but I can expect box drawing characters surrounding any given characters to align correctly or consider it a bug (my terminal is almost certainly going to get CJK and Thai wrong - it's entirely untested -, but if so it is a bug, not a font issue).

That includes if I have to fall back, including fallback to proportional fonts, which will look ugly, but work and remain aligned.

numpad0 | 4 hours ago

ok... I disagree, and I mean no offense, but there's going to be too much contexts and nuances to be taken into account that it's probably not worth trying for both of us. All I can say is that the problem is not that the pipe characters are given inconsistent width but that non-ASCII characters has all different random widths, and if you need texts with double-width characters like ▶, 漢, ก, etc., to align in a grid, you have to pick a fixed-width(not "monospace") font for the specific language and exclusively use that font for everything within that contiguous text area. Or you can try to fix Unicode so that symbols become variable width so to align to grid or something, but that's going to take a lot of effort.

vidarh | 4 hours ago

No, you don't need to pick a fixed width font for that. You will get the best results with one, but rescaling the glyphs works just fine. I've written a font renderer. It's not hard.

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.

numpad0 | 3 hours ago

I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible), than about implementing a complete custom graphical text rendering system specific to your app that butcher font files to put glyphs wherever you want?

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.

vidarh | 2 hours ago

> I thought this discussion is more about somehow aligning pipes over multiple lines in existing console emulators(impossible)

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.

numpad0 | 14 hours ago

Aren't those non-ASCII "rich" symbols from Japanese fonts around PC-98/Win95 domains anyway? For me with my background, it was always obvious that mixing full-width character in ASCII text never go well for various reasons. For ASCII arts, it is obvious that vertical lines never line up, and there are going to be tons of wasted spaces and different kinds of whitespaces needed to compensate for those. I wonder if specifying MS Gothic and retuning widths for it could help, at least for Windows/Linux.

jack1243star | 14 hours ago

Funny you'd mention MS Gothic (fixed-width), since old school Japanese ASCII-art on image boards assume MS PGothic (proportional!) instead. Some sites even try to detect ASCII art and force font-family on that specific post.

numpad0 | 12 hours ago

Yup, 2ch.net/5ch.net/5ch.io uses the MS P Gothic and there were app features and fonts like Mona Font to emulate that. They were not imageboards, though.

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.

torginus | 9 hours ago

Considering the Chinese are one of the major contributors to AI, I would think this was a solved problem by now, at least in some other CLI based coding agent.

dspillett | 6 hours ago

> Thus, it falls back to Segoe UI Symbol, which does not have the same fixed width

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.

tulio_ribeiro | 12 hours ago

Thanks for doing the work and hosting this. This will very quickly become one of my daily drivers.

bearjaws | 7 hours ago

Thank you for creating an alternative to the toxic mermaid renderer on their website.

Trying to monetize Mermaid was disgusting and honestly rings to me like trying to monetize Markdown.

Imustaskforhelp | 6 hours ago

Is there anything opposite of this perhaps as well?

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.

clkao | 11 hours ago

I had Fable 5 port this to golang[1], as I was looking for a way to render mermaid for my own markdown review tool[2]

[1] https://github.com/spacedock-dev/mermaidtext

[2] https://github.com/spacedock-dev/subspace-beta

skeptic_ai | 4 hours ago

How could be a fork outside of this repo? “ This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.”

sunaookami | 3 hours ago

Looks like there is a newer commit that was force-pushed and overwrote the linked one?

giancarlostoro | 4 hours ago

This has been my favorite coding harness of all time. The mouse works for a lot of things. Theres keybindings that confuse me, but I otherwise enjoyed it. I might wind up forking / contributing in the hopes of helping to make it somewhat better. I had built my own also using Rust but I liked their implementation much better. This might explain part of how they pulled it off.

cdnsteve | 15 hours ago

Why is SpaceX building developer tools?

britannio | 10 hours ago

SpaceXAI (Formerly xAI)

ryandvm | 5 hours ago

Because each business losing money has to be placed inside a larger Matryoshka doll.

sashank_1509 | 15 hours ago

Why are these coding agents millions of lines of rust code. I understand they are using LLM’s to code their tool, but shouldn’t these tools be much simpler, smh.

luciana1u | 13 hours ago

they open-sourced the scaffolding but not the building. the 'open' in the company name is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

jdiff | 8 hours ago

It certainly is, but what does OpenAI have to do with Grok Build?
Just don't set it to your home directory lol.

ClipBGNET | 13 hours ago

I think it's the right & smart thing to do.

drdrek | 11 hours ago

I like that the trailing players strategy (Meta, xAI) is to open source the moat of the leaders. I think we will all benefit from it. and hopefully both the leaders and the trailing players will be much less powerful in the end.

radicalriddler | 11 hours ago

What does this open source that the Codex harness hasn't already?

logicchains | 10 hours ago

You can't use your mouse with command line Codex.

minraws | 10 hours ago

You can trivially add it to codex..

bearjaws | 7 hours ago

I really hate that they added mouse integration with Claude Code.

Nothing like it prompting you for an answer and you click on to the terminal accidentally, resulting in you choosing an answer.

the_duke | 9 hours ago

Codex CLI was open source from the start.

The reason they open sourced this is because grok-build uploaded entire directories.

drnick1 | 4 hours ago

I wonder if that malicious feature was removed from the open release. In addition, if the builds aren't reproducible and people just run the binaries distributed by X instead of building from source, there is no guarantee that they aren't running a version with malware.

jatins | 11 hours ago

As open source as their timeline algorithm?

alansaber | 10 hours ago

Neat, open source harness is definitely a step in the right direction.

doringeman | 8 hours ago

You can run it using Docker Sandboxes: https://github.com/docker/sbx-kits-contrib/pull/156. Doesn't replace reading the code, but `sbx policy log` shows every request the network policy blocked or allowed, and combined with an explicit allowlist, that gives you a meaningfully more secure environment to run it in.

glasffordd | 7 hours ago

Some sly marketing by Elon. What looks like a gift actually adds to his pocketbook. The agent is free but it runs on his paid models by default, so every task it does spends tokens with him.

davidmurdoch | 7 hours ago

This is not sly.

vorticalbox | 7 hours ago

in the same way claude and codex both use their paid models by default.

at least codex and grok are open source so we can see what is going on.

sunhp | 7 hours ago

this seems a very good move imho