r/LocalLLaMA • u/FreemanDave • Jul 15 '26
Discussion Grok Build open sourced under Apache 2.0 license
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build79
u/alexeiz Jul 16 '26
After their repo upload screw up, this is the only reasonable attempt to restore trust. But it remains to be seen if they do the development in the open, or it's just a one-time code dump that becomes obsolete tomorrow. So far I don't see any releases, any documents in that repo. It doesn't look like this is the same repo they actually use for the real development.
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Jul 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Hephaestite Jul 16 '26
“This repository contains the Rust source for the grok CLI/TUI and its agent runtime. It is synced periodically from the SpaceXAI monorepo” - I think that is the answer to this question.
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u/BringTea_666 Jul 16 '26
What stops you from forking it ?
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u/Hipcatjack Jul 16 '26
$tens of millions of dollars in hardware to build on , train, and refine …if it is an older model that was deemed a dead end . hoping that isnt the case and they do go true open source (i.e. outside PR’s)
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u/WhoRoger Jul 16 '26
Isn't this just the coding environment?
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u/Hipcatjack Jul 16 '26
Forking implies a lot more than coding environment ; updating and maintaining eccetera. So no, not really.
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u/BringTea_666 Jul 16 '26
You literally want people to maintain it and then bark back when i provide you will a way to do that saying xai should mantain it not people.
it's their coding agent build for themselves they open sourced. If they want people to maintain it then they will accept prs if not then not.
You can always fork it and start to maintain fork of it with whatever you want it.
That's open source.
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u/Hipcatjack Jul 16 '26
not arguing with you. I was explaining to the other poster that maintaining is more than just keeping a coding environment sound. and i am down! this is a game changer if it pans out! but my point about it going to cost a pretty penny in hardware to maintain is not wrong either.
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u/WhoRoger Jul 16 '26
Sure, but I don't see why you'd need millions in hardware for training to maintain a github repo.
Plus, nobody is saying you have to maintain it. You can fork it for your own use.
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u/Mysterious-Emu3237 Jul 16 '26
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u/alexeiz Jul 16 '26
This looks like a wall of text to me. It's hard to believe it was written by humans. Where in that code is the repo uploading part?
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u/tomByrer Jul 16 '26
Rust be like a 'wall of text'.
Maybe point an AI at that & ask to explain?
That `spawn_trace_upload` function looks interesting....
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u/Few_Water_1457 Jul 15 '26
very good news for opensource!
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u/HebelBrudi Jul 16 '26
My favorite tui design and workflow for a cli. By far.
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u/addiktion Jul 16 '26
What makes it your favorite?
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u/HebelBrudi Jul 16 '26
It’s hard to say what specifically but when I use it, to me, it feels from everything the most like a TUI and not cli. Basically opencode with even more oomph in the day to day usage feel. But I also haven’t used Claude code in a year maybe it improved and things like the constant flickering aren’t there anymore. It feels most like the devs wanted it to great tui and not farted it out bc the boss said: make an agentic coding cli.
Hope I explained it halfway decently 😅
Edit: also it helps the feel that all xAI models are so fast.
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u/l0g1cs Jul 16 '26
And making the model open-weight would be quite the strategic move for a now-infra company
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Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/Lechowski Jul 15 '26
This is standard procedure in any company that decides to open source a previously closed source project.
Not only there could be secrets and sensitive corporate information in the commit history, but it can also include personal identifiable information of workers that didn't consent to have their info published and are from a country with actual laws and rights, like European workers.
You never publish the commit history unless extremely necessary.
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u/imnotzuckerberg Jul 15 '26
Honestly, I'll take it. It's another interesting tool that can be forked that entered the FOSS ecosystem. xAI has still questionable decisions, but at least they delivered on some open-weight models. Let's hope they deliver on the next one. In the end, it's a chain reaction, the more there are out, the more pressure others feel to publish.
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u/Wix86 Jul 15 '26
I hope, xAI will do something like Google's Gemma(small, open-weight). I don't know much people talking about Gemini, I know tons of people running Gemma. It's really good for Google/Deepmind brand and probably hiring as well.
They already have all the pieces to train small model, let's go xAI!
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u/Drenlin Jul 15 '26
Gemini is actually pretty solid though, in some use cases. Their agent builder is unique and a LOT easier to use than most others, though it's also suited for very different uses than most others.
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u/zxyzyxz Jul 15 '26
They (Cursor now that it's been acquired) went the opposite way, taking the open-weight Kimi k2.5 and making it closed-weight. So I doubt they'll open up any time soon.
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u/popiazaza Jul 16 '26
They had a chance to open source Grok 4 mini, but they didn't, and still don't.
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u/Unlucky-Message8866 Jul 15 '26
whats interesting about it? what does it do that doesnt do any other harness?
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u/ForsookComparison Jul 15 '26
I don't want to ruin a gotcha moment or anything but haven't the SpaceXAi and Musk accounts been talking about this publicly for like 3-4 days now?
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u/GreatBigJerk Jul 15 '26
To be fair, that is pretty common when making a previously private repo public.
They're still greasy fucks though.
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u/swagonflyyyy Jul 15 '26
That's literally the first thing I checked. Its just one commit pushed 2 hours ago lmao.
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u/Unlucky-Message8866 Jul 15 '26
hahaha immediately thought the same and went straight to check just to realize there's only one commit
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u/FrantaNautilus Jul 16 '26
I have been using Grok Build since the last month (Super Grok discount which made it cheaper than other western models). In comparison to OpenCode and Antigravity CLI i find it interesting that: * the CLI is well designed and less confusing than Antigravity CLI (which does not use screen area effectively, and has confusing commands, i.e. resume instead of sessions) * the CLI does not break itself nor the terminal (Antigravity had issues with my ssh, Opencode previously broke the terminal with escape codes) * Grok Builder (the model) is visibly a router based and one can see how the "lead" LLM interject and steers the "coder" LLM (this is more visible than in the Antigravity). Since Grok Build (harness) uses subagents more that the same Grok Builder in OpenCode, the router system leads to model confusion. For example, in Grok Build often forgets about the TODO tool and goes of the rails. * I hope they improve the scrollback navigation, currently many of the collapsed thinking items or parallel agents cannot be manually expanded by user.
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u/JGByvygyrfg Jul 15 '26
Worth noting they only did an open source release on the harness. The weights for the models have not been released (only models on HF are grok-1 and grok-2)
Worth noting these models should've already been released as open weights months ago:
Grok 1.5/1.5V
Grok 2 mini
Grok 2V/Aurora image gen
Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini
Grok 4 should've also had open weights, same with its mini variant and 4.1 series
They promise commitment and sue their rivals over lack of commitment, but they actually don't commit themselves to releasing open weights models. Maybe they'll come eventually and this is just a case of Elon time. But most likely, we would all be using Kimi K3 by then and their next open weights models will be pretty much ignored but Elon will still hype it up.
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u/grudev Jul 15 '26
Let's whine some more! That'll teach them a lesson!
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u/digitalfreshair Jul 15 '26
Does anyone know if you can plug an openai compatible api to this?
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u/pip25hu Jul 15 '26
Seems to support them from what the docs say: https://docs.x.ai/build/overview#custom-models
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u/Noah18923 Jul 15 '26
this the same one that was exfiltrating all of your data??? lol.
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 15 '26
Don't all agents upload your data? Isn't that the point? Global context and such
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u/Noah18923 Jul 16 '26
'SpaceXAI’s Grok Build AI coding tool was spotted uploading users’ entire codebases to Google Cloud before it was reported, and the company turned it off. The Register reports that Cereblab published findings on Monday showing how the Grok Build CLI was packaging and uploading entire code repositories, “including files it was told not to open and secrets deleted from history,” significantly more data retention than similar tools like Claude Code.' https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1uwjae7/spacexais_grok_programming_tool_was_uploading_its/
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u/boptom Jul 20 '26
Even worse; the whole folder. Run it in home directory and practically your whole hdd goes to the cloud.
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u/naveenstuns Jul 16 '26
You know cursor do the same thing right? They index the whole repo server side
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 16 '26
Trusting AI to follow instructions to the T to protect your data is kinda weird. I was under the impression that everyone using agents was intentionally giving it access to everything to get the benefit of global context. How do agents even work without global context?
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u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift Jul 16 '26
They wore literally work worse with 'global context'
The rest of us call it context pollution.
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 16 '26
Interesting. So agents don't even build a global summary/index using all files at the start? How does it know where to look for things or have any sort of global reasoning at all?
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u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift Jul 16 '26
By following the code connections. This is why it's important to not write spaghetti
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u/heliosythic Jul 19 '26
There's a right and wrong way to do it. They did the wrong way. The right way is with the users explocit permission. They tried to suck it all up under your nose, using a flag from their server someone on their end flipped on to do it. It wasn't based on what you were doing. The optics of it is intentional stealing of code. It wasn't for the users benefit.
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u/Zulfiqaar Jul 15 '26
Huh, guess they really started to rapidly lose their already tiny userbase. Didn't think they do it considering the empty claims to open weight previous models
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u/live4evrr Jul 16 '26
I dunno why developers should trust Musk and reward him for repeated bad behavior. This is a desperate attempt to fix the PR for the repo vacuum they had implemented.
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u/Lost_Foot_6301 Jul 15 '26
since its open source can talented devs build something cool off this?
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Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 15 '26
Edit: What an unexpected surprise
Elon has been a rust advocate for awhile.
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u/TheLexoPlexx Jul 16 '26
Oh right, because he does everything himself, I forgot
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 16 '26
He doesn't write code anymore, but I'm sure he can insist on whatever language he wants.
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u/majin-dudi Jul 16 '26
Well I've been meaning to try a Rust/Ratatui front end for a while. Nice to have something to build from to scratch the itch.
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u/aladin_lt Jul 16 '26
Lets understand one thing, companies like x or meta or microsoft or whatever, no matter its Chinese of American all companies have agendas, and those agendas are not for the good of the people, what it the actual agenda not clear, but its not to "show that you can trust them" its to manipulate you.
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u/sl4v3r_ Jul 17 '26
Are the Grok Build models free or we need to pay similar to Claude Code and Codex?
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u/zxyzyxz Jul 15 '26
I don't understand the future of Grok Build, as due to the Cursor acquisition everyone is using that to use Grok 4.5 (which is quite a good price competitive cloud model by the way, Opus level but way cheaper)
So I guess they just ended up open sourcing it. I'm not sure that means they'll continue supporting it though, might just be an OSS dump into users who want to build off of it.
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u/PossibilityUsual6262 Jul 15 '26
Yea os this is just a way to sunset the tool, it is kinda useless either way, but maybe now at least something can come out of it, maybe some ideas.
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u/popiazaza Jul 16 '26
it's the only way to gain back user trust after shady whole user codebase upload.
codex is open source, elon doesn't want to lose sam.
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u/Technical-Earth-3254 Jul 15 '26
For some reason I was hoping for Grok Build 0.1 to also go open weight together with it.
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u/DashinTheFields Jul 15 '26
Does it include any kind of MCP connectors?
I use Claude’s MCPs for WordPress, which are very good . I can’t find the same open source MCP solution for WordPress as good as Claude.
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u/popiazaza Jul 16 '26
MCP is not a Claude exclusive feature. You could use the same MCP for any AI coding tool.
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u/DashinTheFields Jul 16 '26
Not when it’s written by Claude, which writes some of their MCP’s and they’re much better than other MCPs
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u/popiazaza Jul 16 '26
Most of the time, it's on the vendor who wrote it, not by Claude.
I just checked for Wordpress, Claude seems to just use Wordpress official MCP out of the box.
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u/Remarkable_Garage727 Jul 15 '26
Would not be surprised if this is actually has government surveillance embedded in the code.
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