Grok

What hackers pick instead

• ClaudeRecommended for debugging from logs, implementing tricky algorithms and performance tuning, but it makes mistakes on large codebase changes and needs close supervision.5175recommend
• Google GeminiRecommended for everyday questions, image and handwriting understanding, and coding or scripting help, but many report confidently invented facts and dislike it being pushed into every Google product.2195recommend
• ChatGPTA general-purpose chatbot that people use to research faster, understand health issues, learn topics and draft writing, though it often hallucinates and tells you what you want to hear.2186recommend
• Microsoft CopilotValued for tight Microsoft 365 integration that finds work documents while respecting access permissions; critics dislike Copilot buttons pushed everywhere, confusing branding and made-up links.139recommend
• Claude DesktopPeople recommend it as an approachable home for Claude agents, with connectors, artifacts and parallel sessions; critics call the Electron app slow, buggy and resource-heavy, and dislike its large VM.104recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 2929 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters”

2. Grok seems to work faster, and especially in the context of twitter it actually is routinely used, and pulls from current events quite quickly.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Grok 4.3”

3. 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.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Grok outage”

4. 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

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability”

5. Grok has plenty of "non-woke AI" cred which will make it a preferred choice for government-side and politically sensitive workloads

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute”

6. 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.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Grok 4.5”

7. found it good for devops stuff; specifically it often is able to explain and produce working configurations without getting lost

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Grok 4 Fast now has 2M context window”

8. In the benchmark it improved substantially over the previous generation (Grok 4.20). It still doesn't come close to Opus or GPT

   Mixed · Jun 2026

9. 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.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 Scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index”

10. it's a good model for coding, and it sometimes catches bugs that other models (especially open source models) don't always spot

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 Scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index”

11. It's one of the fastest models, and its responses are far smaller/token dense than other models with comparable performance.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Grok 4.3”

12. have it privately research a claim in a post to see if there's anything else backing it up in realtime is extremely helpful

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Work with the Garage Door Up”

13. 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.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?”

14. It's my go to normal stuff. It's fast, balanced and if you want a better researched response you can click "think harder"

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Grok Build Is OSS”

15. I've often used Grok Heavy to get me past a problem when Claude gets stuck. Not always, but it usually can figure it out.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Grok 4.1”

16. I had good experiences with Grok. At least before Gemini 3.7 flash came out it was one of the best fast and cheap models.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale”

17. 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.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Grok 4.7”

18. Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Grok 4.5”

19. On X there's actually a good modern equivalent to "posting links" which is @grok, and letting Grok add to the thread.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)”

20. way more pleasant to use than GPT 5.6 Sol and Claude 4.8/5. It just gets to the point, and is super fast and concise

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Grok 4.6”

21. 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

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas”

22. 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

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “X Didn't Fix Grok's 'Undressing' Problem. It Just Makes People Pay for It”

23. 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.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Grok outage”

24. 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.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Grok 4.6”

25. 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

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs”

26. 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.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Are AI chatbots politically biased?”

27. Grok performed the worst by a significant margin, and the worst part was that it easily became stuck trying minor changes that didn't solve the key problem.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters”

28. Grok's cognitive dissonance due to the need to rewrite reality for Musk's political and moral biases is always going to keep them behind the frontier

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed”

29. Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “EFF is leaving X”

30. 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.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Grok 4.3”

31. Twitter appears to be taking no effort to make this difficult. Even if people can evade guardrails this does not make the guardrails worthless.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced”

32. Well-researched articles describing Grok's alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk's thumb on the scale?

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time”

33. So, if that "software program" had a traditional button UI, a button said "Create CSAM," and the user pushed it, the program's creator is not

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced”

34. if calling yourself mecha hitler while being willing to create csam js "neutral" to you, you have a frankly terrifying hallucinated worldview

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Grok 4.5”

35. made especially more galling by labeling the laundering Elon's particular stew of incoherent political thought as 'maximally truth seeking'

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment”

36. neither Grok 4.20 nor Grok 4.3 have been able to significantly push the intelligence frontier since Grok 4

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Grok 4.3”

37. When I was using Heavy, it was excellent at ensuring grounding and factual statements, but it's not worth $100 more than ChatGPT Pro in capabilities or utility.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability”

38. I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Grok 4.3”

39. Grok came in second with a mobile rendering that featured odd spacing and horizontal lines placed seemingly randomly but at least kept the text legible

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Can LLMs bring the Berkshire Hathaway web site into the 21st century?”

40. I don't think these are yet Fable level - the difference tends to get discovered in the long tail of tasks - but they're close enough, they're cheap

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Grok 4.6”