# Grok 727 Hacker News commenters recommended Grok and 1249 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.12 years (19 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for fast, concise answers, real-time current events through X, and useful second opinions on code, but critics widely cite Musk-driven political bias and weak safety guardrails. ## Why people recommend it - Fast and concise responses (6 comments): "Grok seems to work faster, and especially in the context of twitter it actually is routinely used, and pulls from current events quite quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977203)) "It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast . I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276408)) "neither Grok 4.20 nor Grok 4.3 have been able to significantly push the intelligence frontier since Grok 4" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978820)) - Catches bugs, helps with code (6 comments): "is a huge leap forward. Not quite as good as Opus 5 for code in my experience, but better and more succinct for understanding human documents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552256)) "it nearly oneshot, except for the fact it made a one character typo in some file path handling code that took me an hour to diagnose" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362700)) "found it good for devops stuff; specifically it often is able to explain and produce working configurations without getting lost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45863053)) - Real-time X and news integration (4 comments): "Grok is integrated into Twitter is a pretty good thing for discussions, as it is certainly a more objective and rational voice than most human participants" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377280)) "Grok seems to work faster, and especially in the context of twitter it actually is routinely used, and pulls from current events quite quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977203)) "have it privately research a claim in a post to see if there's anything else backing it up in realtime is extremely helpful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903565)) - Fewer restrictions than rivals (4 comments): "Grok has plenty of "non-woke AI" cred which will make it a preferred choice for government-side and politically sensitive workloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48425267)) "It's the only one that has bled for not just trying to play it super safe with political correctness, but trying to be impartial." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841506)) "I used to be able to use Grok for these things, as it was largely less "censored" but that seems to no longer be the case." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533614)) ## What people warn about - Political bias from Musk's influence (7 comments): "I don't know how anyone can trust anything Grok says when (for me) in "favorite person (part 2)", every model picked Gandhi apart from the Grok models which picked Elon Musk" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46570229)) "The real concern for me is incredibly rich people with no empathy for you or I, having interstitial control of that kind of messaging. See, all of the grok ai tweaks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145625)) "Anecdotally, from one attempt at chatting with it, Grok is far and away the most obviously dishonest and shifts conversations towards right leaning talking points." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664843)) - Generates CSAM and harmful content (6 comments): "the fact that we aren't having discussions about ChatGPT or Claude as CSAM generators also suggests that Grok could be limited in ways that it isn't being limited currently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601482)) "Grok is directly tied to Twitter in a way that other models don't have, so the use of Grok to do this stuff is inherently more public and traumatising for the targets." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285677)) "I have no idea what people are doing to get it to generate illegal content. I only know there are thousands of cases of it via articles about it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47974829)) - Lags top models on complex coding (4 comments): "In the benchmark it improved substantially over the previous generation (Grok 4.20). It still doesn't come close to Opus or GPT" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359105)) "For coding it's… okay. I tried 4.6 and it feels similar to Opus from 12 months ago, or maybe Sonnet from 9 months ago." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793900)) "Grok doesn't even compare to the others. I can ask for a big task and it will say "Done!" like 3 minutes in, but it will have done just the least amount of work possible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552015)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Claude](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude.md): 5175 recommend - [Google Gemini](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini.md): 2195 recommend - [ChatGPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chatgpt.md): 2186 recommend - [Microsoft Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-copilot.md): 139 recommend - [Claude Desktop](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-desktop.md): 104 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://grok.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Grok", https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).