I tested Grok Bot, Grok 4.6, and Cursor Origin - here’s my honest take

I don't know if you know this, but the whole OpenAI versus Anthropic thing is old news. Everybody I know is secretly becoming a Grok boy. Yep. Ever since Cursor was acquired by SpaceX for, I believe it was $60 billion American dollars, everybody's been really excited about the new products released from the Cursor team. And in fact, I'm hearing more and more positive things about the Grok models for coding and the Grok models in general. In today's episode of How I AI, we're gonna go through all the releases from the Cursor, xAI, SpaceX, whatever, the Elon cinematic universe of code builders and model builders. We're gonna go through all their products and I'm gonna tell you what I think of GroqBot, Origin, the new GitHub competitor from Cursor, as well as the Groq model. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Bolt.new, the AI app builder for people who have ideas and want to ship them. Most AI tools spit out code that looks great in a demo and falls apart the second you try to do anything real with it. Or they lock you into their own platform with no real way out. Bolt is different. You describe what you wanna build, a startup MVP, a landing page, an internal tool, a side project, and Bolt generates production-ready code in minutes. Connect Stripe or any other MCP, hook up your domain, and deploy it live. Founders are using Bolt to build businesses doing real revenue. Product managers are shipping prototypes their teams actually use. Designers and marketers are launching campaigns without waiting in line. Anyone can build, engineering can ship, everyone wins. You just need an idea and a weekend. Check it out at bolt.new/howiai. I'm going to start with the most accessible product on our list today. Grokbot. In case you missed it, the Cursor/XAI team released Grokbot, which is a chat-style agent in a desktop and mobile app that you can use to do knowledge work for you. It's very similar to an OpenCLAW, but it's simpler, hosted, and easier to use. If you look at Grokbot just from a UI perspective— and I'm just pulling up the marketing site right now, we'll look at my Grokbot in a minute— It is definitely pulling from that iMessage terminal streamlined chat experience, and it's doing something I really love. Not everybody loves this, but I love a multi-agent experience. I want each of my agents to have a job. I want them to have a name. I don't want one agent to rule them all. And the team has really leaned into this ethos with GrokBot. Now, I've been testing GrokBot. I had a couple days early access. And then I've been testing it in earnest over about the past week. And I think there are some pros to GrokBot. I think there's some cons to GrokBot, but I do suspect that GrokBot is going to catch the attention of Cursor customers who want an all-purpose agent for their employees. So let's go into my GrokBot and show you a little bit about how it works. Now, as I said, this has this very like iMessage style experience. It's a left bubble and right bubble, and you just chitty-chat with your GrokBots. I have set up a couple of Grokbots in my own account. There is Prati McProd, my product manager Grokbot that's hooked up to ChatPRD. I have one of the out-of-the-box Grokbots commitment tracker that just keeps me honest with things I've told people that I will do for them, basically emails I need to reply to. I have a moneymaker bot that chases invoices and payments and sales deals. I have a case study buddy because I'm doing a bunch of case studies. And I have a Groq bot that monitors all my data for ChatPRT and tells me trends that I should pay attention to. So I think the magic of Groq bot, if I had to tell you one thing that is the magic of Groq bot, it is plugins. So I've always thought that Cursor was the best MCP client. I still to this day, when I want to connect to different MCPs in my stack, would still default generally to Cursor. I thought the connector experience was really nice, and I thought the harness did a really nice job of talking to all these systems. They have brought that great plugin MCP experience into GrokBot. But there's one killer feature, which is for any one of these connectors, whether it's Gmail or Slack or an MCP, you can connect multiple accounts to GrokBot. So if you have 2 Gmails, you can connect 2 Gmails. If you're in 7 different Slacks, you can connect the different Slacks. This is something that Codex has not figured out. Claude has not figured out. No one seems to figure out that I have approximately a dozen email addresses and Slack accounts and different things that I need to log in, even if it's the same service. This experience of setting up multiple accounts per connector Huge, huge, huge benefit. You could like package it up and send it off. It would have product market fit with me. As you can see here, I have already 4 email addresses connected to Gmail. I have my ChatPurity one and a couple other business ones that I'm working on. Having all 4 of these connected and being able to traverse all those accounts in GrokBot is a killer feature. Just thank you to the cursor /xai team for doing this. If you did this and this alone, I would be very happy, but they did not do that and that alone. GroqBot ships with tons and tons of out-of-the-box plugins. These are generally the ones that were available in Cursor as well. And so I've installed your basic productivity ones. I've installed GitHub and I've installed the ChatPRD plugin. And really I've been using GroqBot as a way to just traverse and use my data. So again, it's like a little bit of A fancy MCP client, but it does come with something special, which is every Groq bot comes with a computer. And so you can actually go into this virtual machine and this is Prodi McProd's computer. It's not very exciting, but it can use Chrome, it can use terminal, and it has some files. And so again, this is like a little bit of an OpenClaw Lite. Where it has a virtual machine. That virtual machine can use the web and it has connectors and MCPs. Now, what do I think of the experience using Groq Bot? Well, I will say setting up a Groq Bot, super simple. You can simply create a bot. It will start up that machine, it will start up a bot, and then you can just tell it what to do. So this one just got stood up. What's the first thing I want you on? And I say, I want you to be a family manager bot that keeps track of my personal email and personal calendar. Can't spell calendar. And again, it's going to go ahead and say, great, I'm going to find all your connectors, I'm going to set it up, and I'm going to learn myself. Really, really simple, streamlined onboarding experience. And it's going to go ahead and give me pretty good responses back and do work on my behalf. It's pretty Chat-based, nothing fancy, but its genius is in its simplicity. Now, what I don't like about GrokBot? Well, I don't like that it's so simple, and I don't like that I can't hack it. If you look at my OpenCLaws, they are chaotic and technical and impossible to use and high maintenance. And I love them. I love them. Grokbot, I have a little bit less control over. I manage them a little bit less tightly, and so I love them less. You know, like my children. The child— the joy is in the challenge. And I will tell you, Grokbot has not challenged me because it works simply and it works out of the box. The other thing I don't like about GrokBot is you don't get to pick what model you're working with. You really actually don't get to have that sort of like soul.md control over what GrokBot does, how it's configured, etc. And you know me, I just like to craft out as if out of clay my agents. So I like that experience. I don't think everybody else does. So if you're looking for that like highly tunable, highly hackable, highly transparent setup for your agent. Groq Bot is not that. OpenClaw or Hermes or any of those is a little bit more like that. And then of course it doesn't run on my machine. I don't have control over it. It's a third-party system, some good, some bad. That being said, it works. And the connector and kind of like UX affordances are quite nice. I would say just related to that, the last thing that I don't love about GrokBot is whatever model it's using, and maybe it's Grok, maybe it's— sounds a lot like Claude Slop, is I just— no vibes. Just no vibes. The vibes are bad. It's like, I don't want to hang out with this person. Doesn't really make me cheerful. I have tuned my OpenCLaws to be exactly who I want to talk to when I want to talk to them. This, I'm getting like too much of that, like classic slop, not this, not that slop, terrible names for products like a scope knife, um, just stuff that I would never say. And so I think the personality tuning and the voice tuning across all these harnesses are really important, but they're even more important if you are going to do this multi-agent strategy where you're going to have people name their agents and have them do work for you. A couple use cases that I think you could use GrokBot for, again, I've made— I like to make my agents have roles, so I've made a PM one, I made data analyst one, I made a deal desk one, I made a finance one, I'm making a family one. I think just thinking that way, what kind of teammate do I want? And then giving that teammate the tools it needs and giving it the instructions it needs is a great way to design your agents. Now I would demo more, but I actually think this is all about workflow. So the product itself is super simple. I think the use cases are what make it interesting. And then the connector experience being Top tier, I think is going to help the Cursor XAI SpaceX team get their claws in the enterprise use case. So I'm really curious, drop in the comments, tell me what your use cases are. Um, I will continue to share ones and I will let you know if I decide I'm going to migrate any of my OpenCLaws over to GroqBot. If you want me to move over, SpaceX team, just make GroqBot way harder to manage. And then apparently I will fall in love with it and never use anything else. I'm going to keep an eye on this, but TL;DR, super simple, great connectors. Use your agents as employees, and if you like a bad time, stay with, stay with OpenCLAW. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. The teamwork graph in Jira delivers 44% more accurate agent results with 48% less token usage. That's a huge difference when working with AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex, or Copilot. The hardest part of shipping with AI isn't the code, it's the context. What's the right ticket? What did the spec say? What got decided in Slack? The teamwork graph pulls all of that from across your entire stack, from Jira and Confluence to GitHub, and feeds it directly to your agents before they write a single line. You assign the work, the agent gets everything it needs, and a PR surfaces when it's ready. No digging, no context switching. No broken flow. Same team, smarter agents. Try it free at jira.dev. That's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V. Okay. The next release from the Cursor team is Origin, the GitHub replacement announced at Cursor's conference this year and finally released in early access. Today, which will be a couple days ago when we get this episode live. So Origin is in early access beta, and they've called it kind of codebase inside the app. So if you're in the Cursor web app or you're in the desktop app, you're really talking about codebase, which is of course the right primitive for something that is code hosting. Now, the whole value proposition that Cursor has put in front of us in terms of why they should build a GitHub replacement Is they are basically building an agent-native GitHub replacement, which means that it's got all the Git primitives. It's got code, it's got diffs, it's got pull requests, it's got all that same Git primitives stuff, but it's built in a UI way. It's built in a UX way for agents to collaborate with. And in particular, of course, the Cursor Cloud agents and the Cursor desktop app. And, and, and the Cursor CLI. So it's, it's Git. We're all stuck with Git. We've agreed on Git. Now, have we agreed on GitHub? And seems like the tides are turning, but Cursor's bet is that we are going to want an agent-native GitHub, and that GitHub is not going to get there fast enough. So what does that look like tactically? Well, Origin has repos. You can of course import GitHub repos. I'll tell you a little bit about my experience there. It has pull requests, which you can see. Agents can reply to comments. They can be assigned as reviewers, all those sorts of things. And there's a small set of extensions, CI/CD extensions, for example, like build preview branches in Vercel for those who want it. Okay. So what does that actually look like? Well, you go into the Cursor web app and you click codebase, and then you basically import your GitHub repos. Very smart. Now, Was not smart to release this the day that GitHub had a major outage, or maybe it was genius to release this the day that GitHub had a major outage. So I had some trouble with this GitHub import, but all you do is click sync from GitHub. You authorize your GitHub account, pick which repositories you want to sync in, and then they are here. As you can see, you have kind of the same primitives. You have code. So this is your code view. You have pull requests. So you have pull requests and then you have some settings. What I would say is with the GitHub integration, it's really, it seems like it's just a wrapper on the GitHub API. So yes, in theory, this has been kind of redesigned. You can see here, like there's some nice things about how BugBot feedback has been shown or how cursor feedback has been shown. It has some like smart little suggestions at the top that are Are nice, but at the end of the day, this is, this is just like GitHub with maybe less features, late, maybe less integrated, much more integrated with Cursor. So I appreciate that. And I can see the vision. I can see the vision, I promise. But right now, if I'm using a GitHub hosted repo and I'm not ready to go like all in on the Cursor ecosystem, there's just not enough here in this Early launch to get me to pull over. And so yes, I can like @cursor here and ask it to fix the Vercel preview branch issue. Please. Why is it failing? Because this is failing. I can do that. Yep. We got an error, so maybe I can't do that. Um, GitHub's having an outage right now, so maybe this is a GitHub issue, maybe this Cursor issue. But again, like today's— today Origin, I'm seeing that they're setting the groundwork for getting you to get your repos into Cursor. They're setting the groundwork for Bugbot and Cursor to be first-class citizens in your repo. I'm sure there are some affordances on like the CLI side that make it easier for cloud agents to open PRs, and it's just going to be just like a nice buttoned-up experience. But again, if you have invested deeply in GitHub, which everybody has, and you have your automations and you have your actions and you have your code owners and you have all this stuff, we're going to have to see more from this experience, more from why AI native, why agent native matters. For us all to move over to this new product. Now, literally came out today, they're not even calling it beta, they're calling it early beta. So I have faith, I'm excited to see what this looks like. But again, just the current GitHub integrated sync, it's like a little slower. I get the redesign, but it's not giving me life, and I'm just too embedded in the GitHub ecosystem. I need to see something wow from this in order for me to click unlock. You know, and, and I've spent an hour with it, 2 hours with it, not that much. I've messed around with opening PRs inside Cursor. Again, like, it's redesigned. It's synced to GitHub though, so it kind of feels like I'm being slow migrated over to Cursor and that they just want me to get— like, that they just want to get their claws in me and then really wow me with this experience. But out of the box, I'm not yet feeling the vision, although I'm excited to see how this plays out. It's worth experimenting with. I think it's worth keeping your eye on. It's interesting. No one is happy with GitHub right now. Both stability is like terrible, and they really haven't yet given us that like AI-native, completely reimagined Git experience that we're hoping for. That being said, it is super early on Cursor Origin. I think we are mostly in the very, very, very early stages of a very, very, very long migration. And it will be interesting to see if Cursor becomes the new centralized source of truth for code, or if it continues to just operate in the writing code agents space. All right. So those are our 2 products. I would say I like GrokBot. I have not yet seen the light on Origin. The last thing we're gonna talk about is Grok 4.6. This is the model that has everybody I know texting me saying, I think I kind of like the Grok models. Now, I think we're all trying this because Cursor has defaulted. I've noticed some of their models to Grok. Um, not sure if I love it, but that means we give it a try. And you know, we're gonna put benchmarks aside. Everybody picks the benchmarks that they like. I wanna talk about the HowIAI Vibe Review for anybody who is new. Do whenever a new model comes out. I do a couple things. I test PRDs, I test prototypes, I test design wireframes, technical changes, and if I like talking to the model. I run all these evals blind, so I run them against models, and then I actually go through and grade all of these designs live myself. I've made some changes to the How I AI Bench, in particular this design one, where I let the model decide how it wants to redesign the page, and I've made an eval for a very complicated claims adjudication wireframe that has a lot of complex interactions. So those are 2 new things that we added to the How I AI ViBench. And then we ran Groq 4.6 through these models. I graded them. AI judges them, I judge them, and then we put them together in a— Presentation that I show with you before I even know what the scores are. So let's get to the How I AI Clear Weighted Index of Grok 4.6 compared to other models. All right, so here are the results. Now remember, this is my benchmark, so I get to decide how we grade things. And so it is 70% my taste, 30% our LLM as a Judge taste. And interestingly enough, Grok 4.6 is right up there with my, my favorite, 5.6 SOL, beating out both Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 on the CLAIRE index. I am not surprised by this. I do love GPT-5.6 SOL. It's my default, but I am surprised to see 4.6 up here. I didn't hate it. Now, if you look at the overall recommendation by task, You'll see that 5.6 is my favorite direct writer on PRDs. I just like the clean way of writing. It's very matter of the fact. It's very comprehensive, a little bit technical, but not overly complex. I also like a GPT-5.6 prototype. And so, um, I rated those quite highly. Opus 5 got graded by the LLM as a judge as the best implementer for a technical, like, bug triage problem. And then absolutely zero surprise, I continue to like Sonnet 5 for an OpenCLAW agent chit-chat experience. This always wins. I know Sonnet 5, and for very pithy AI back and forth, OpenCLAW model, I just have not found anything better. Now, if we look at my opinions about prototypes, it's really interesting to see that When following art direction, I like 5.6, but when given broad decisions to make its own design decisions, I like Grok 4.6. Now, I suspect that this is because I can just spot GPT and Claude slop a mile away. A mile away. GPT-5.6 loves forest green. Claude loves a brown, tan, orange combo. So I think I was just enjoying this breath of fresh air that was Groq 4.6 that was not those 2 things. But in terms of executing complex UIs, I still really like 5.6 SOL. And when following art direction, I still like 5.6 SOL. Okay, so let's see what it actually shipped. So first, uh, question I was trying to answer in this benchmark is, can it follow explicit design instruction. And GPT-5.6 SOL and Groq both followed my instructions well and did a relatively good non-slop job of following instructions. GPT-5.6 just continues to crush at this dock routing app that I have it make, where it has to give a very complex but easy to parse at a glance UI for managing, I guess, like container ships. crushes. It always does better than the competition. But I think that Grok did a nice job with my technical incident triage app as well as this editorial page. Now, when it's not given any design, we saw that every model did pretty good. We saw a couple good designs out of FiveSix. We saw some clean designs out of Claude Sonnet 5s. And my favorite one was actually This design from 4.6, which is CloudSlop adjacent. We see an orange, we see a brown, but was actually quite cute and a good interactive kind of ordering system for a coffee shop. So I was really pleased with that one. Dense information architecture. I of course loved 5.6. I think it's the best at complex UI and designing things that are not overwhelming. But are technically complete. And then in terms of just like taking a generic design and making it a little better, I saw some good results from Opus and Sonnet. But when you aggregated all this up, all the ones I scored, good and bad, the 2 that bubbled up to the top were again 5.6 SOL as well as 4.6. Now what's really funny about this, again, this is 70% my taste, 30% The LLM is a judge. If you take my taste out of it, the LLM hates Grok, and it loves Claude Opus. It loves Sonnet, and it does not like GPT-56 Soul. Again, this is not weighted by an Anthropic model. I actually use GPT-5.5 to grade all these things because it's actually the harshest judge. So while the models still like Claude, I, Claire. like GPT-5.6, and I like Grok 4.6 for design. Now, this isn't my experience talking to the model, although you all know I love to do that. Um, this is pure outputs. So all I will say is my conclusion here is the Grok model is a competitor. None of it was terrible. I liked a lot of it compared to the models that you would use out of the box, and combined with cursors, harness, Its investment in new ways of thinking about things like Git and fun products like GroqBot. I would say it's time for all of us to maybe become some level of a Groq boy. I am so excited about all this new stuff. It's really fun to look at. Again, true transparency, I'm still spending a lot of my time in Codex. I'm spending a lot of time with the 5.6 models. But given this experience, I think about spinning up Cursor a little bit more for coding and see if I can continue To like and get value out of Groq, Groq, Groq. Thanks for joining this mini episode of How AI. I wanna hear from you whether you love GroqBot, if you think Cursor's gonna replace GitHub, and whether or not you've switched to Groq for any of your coding tasks. See you soon. Thanks so much for watching. 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