Grok Code Fast 1

by Terretta • 11 months ago

512 326 11 months ago

lostsock• 11 months ago

Trying this out now via OpenCode. Seems to be pretty good so far, certainly quick! Free for the next week as well which is a bonus

cft2• 11 months ago

it's free in Cursor till Sept 2. My experience is subpar so far

giancarlostoro9• 11 months ago

Its focus seems to be on faster responses, which Grok 3 definitely is good at. I have a different approach to LLMs and coding, I want to understand their proposed solutions and not just paste garbled up code (unless its scaffolded) if you treat every LLM as a piecemeal thing when designing code (or really trying to figure out anything) and go step by step, you get better results from most models.

johnfn• 11 months ago

Ah, so this is what the Sonic model that Cursor had was. I've been doing this personal bench where I ask each model to create a 3D render of a guy using a laptop on a desk. I haven't written up a post to show the different output from each model, yet, but it's been a fun way to test the capabilities. Opus was probably the best -- Sonic put the guy in the middle of the desk, and the laptop floating over his head. Sonic was very fast, though!

boole1854• 11 months ago

It's interesting that the benchmark they are choosing to emphasize (in the one chart they show and even in the "fast" name of the model) is token output speed.

I would have thought it uncontroversial view among software engineers that token quality is much important than token output speed.

eterm• 11 months ago

It depends how fast.

If an LLM is often going to be wrong anyway, then being able to try prompts quickly and then iterate on those prompts, could possibly be more valuable than a slow higher quality output.

Ad absurdum, if it could injest and work on an entire project in milliseconds, then it has mucher geater value to me, than a process which might take a day to do the same, even if the likelihood of success is also strongly affected.

It simply enables a different method of interactive working.

Or it could supply 3 different suggestions in-line while working on something, rather than a process which needs to be explicitly prompted and waited on.

Latency can have critical impact on not just user experience but the very way tools are used.

Now, will I try Grok? Absolutely not, but that's a personal decision due to not wanting anything to do with X, rather than a purely rational decision.

postalcoder• 11 months ago

Besides being a faster slot machine, to the extent that they're any good, a fast agentic LLM would be very nice to have for codebase analysis.

giancarlostoro9• 11 months ago

If an LLM is often going to be wrong anyway, then being able to try prompts quickly and then iterate on those prompts, could possibly be more valuable than a slow higher quality output.

Asking any model to do things in steps is usually better too, as opposed to feeding it three essays.

346792• 11 months ago

If an LLM is often going to be wrong anyway, then being able to try prompts quickly and then iterate on those prompts, could possibly be more valuable than a slow higher quality output.

Before MoE was a thing, I built what I called the Dictator, which was one strong model working with many weaker ones to achieve a similar result as MoE, but all the Dictator ever got was Garbage In, so guess what came out?

6r17• 11 months ago

Tbh I kind of disagree ; there are certain use-cases were legitimately speed would be much more interesting such as generating a massive amount of HTML. Tough I agree this makes it look like even more of a joke for anything serious.

They reduce the costs tough !

jsheard• 11 months ago

That's far from the worst metric that xAI has come up with...

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1958854561579638960

Rover2223• 11 months ago

what's wrong with rapid updates to an app?

esafak2• 11 months ago

I agree. Coding faster than humans can review it is pointless. Between fast, good, and cheap, I'd prioritize good and cheap.

Fast is good for tool use and synthesizing the results.

peab• 11 months ago

depends for what.

For autocompleting simple functions (string manipulation, function definitions, etc), the quality bar is pretty easy to hit, and speed is important.

If you're just vibe coding, then yeah, you want quality. But if you know what you're doing, I find having a dumber fast model is often nicer than a slow smart model that you still need to correct a bit, because it's easier to stay in flow state.

With the slow reasoning models, the workflow is more like working with another engineer, where you have to review their code in a PR

jml78• 11 months ago

To a point. If gpt5 takes 3 minutes to output and qwen3 does it in 10 seconds and the agent can iterate 5 times to finish before gpt5, why do I care if gpt5 one shot it and qwen took 5 iterations

wahnfrieden2• 11 months ago

It doesn’t though. Fast but dumb models don’t progressively get better with more iterations.

ant6n• 11 months ago

ChaptGPT5 takes 5 times the time to finish, and still produces garbage.

furyofantares• 11 months ago

Fast can buy you a little quality by getting more inference on the same task.

I use Opus 4.1 exclusively in Claude Code but then I also use zen-mcp server to get both gpt5 and gemini-2.5-pro to review the code and then Opus 4.1 responds. I will usually have eyeballed the code somewhere in the middle here but I'm not fully reviewing until this whole dance is done.

I mean, I obviously agree with you in that I've chosen the slowest models available at every turn here, but my point is I would be very excited if they also got faster because I am using a lot of extra inference to buy more quality before I'm touching the code myself.

dotancohen• 11 months ago

  > I use Opus 4.1 exclusively in Claude Code but then I also use zen-mcp server to get both gpt5 and gemini-2.5-pro to review the code and then Opus 4.1 responds.

I'd love to hear how you have this set up.

giancarlostoro9• 11 months ago

I'm more curious if its based on Grok 3 or what, I used to get reasonable answers from Grok 3. If that's the case, the trick that works for Grok and basically any model out there is to ask for things in order and piecemeal, not all at once. Some models will be decent at the 'all at once' approach, but when me and others have asked it in steps it gave us much better output. I'm not yet sure how I feel about Grok 4, have not really been impressed by it.

M4v3R• 11 months ago

Speed absolutely matters. Of course if the quality is trash then it doesn't matter, but a model that's on par with Claude Sonnet 4 AND very speedy would be an absolute game changer in agentic coding. Right now you craft a prompt, hit send and then wait, and wait, and then wait some more, and after some time (anywhere from 30 seconds to minutes later) the agent finishes its job.

It's not long enough for you to context switch to something else, but long enough to be annoying and these wait times add up during the whole day.

It also discourages experimentation if you know that every prompt will potentially take multiple minutes to finish. If it instead finished in seconds then you could iterate faster. This would be especially valuable in the frontend world where you often tweak your UI code many times until you're satisfied with it.

defen• 11 months ago

I would have thought it uncontroversial view among software engineers that token quality is much important than token output speed.

We already know that in most software domains, fast (as in, getting it done faster) is better than 100% correct.

ojosilva• 11 months ago

After trying Cerebras free API (not affiliated) which delivers Qwen Coder 480b and gpt-oss-120b a mind boggling ~3000 tps, that output speed is the first thing I checked out when considering a model for speed. I just wish Cerebras had a better overall offering on their cloud, usage is capped at 70M tokens / day and people are reporting that it's easily hit and highly crippling for daily coding.

scottyeager3• 11 months ago

They have a "max" plan with 120m tokens/day limit for $200/month: https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/introducing-cerebras-code

CuriouslyC• 11 months ago

For agentic workflows, speed and good tool use are the most important thing. Agents should use tools for things by design, and that can include reasoning tools and oracles. The agent doesn't need to be smart, it just needs a line to someone who is that can give the agent a hyper-detailed plan to follow.

scottyeager3• 11 months ago

Fast inference can change the entire dynamic or working with these tools. At the typical speeds, I usually try to do something else while the model works. When the model works really fast, I can easily wait for it to finish.

So the total difference includes the cost of context switching, which is big.

Potentially speed matters less in a scenario that is focused on more autonomous agents running in the background. However I think most usage is still highly interactive these days.

Workaccount2• 11 months ago

Is this the model that is the "Coding" version of Grok-4 promised when Grok-4 had awful coding benchmarks?

I guess if you cannot do well in benchmarks, instead pick an easier to pump up one and run with that - speed. Looking online for benchmarks the first thing that came up was a reddit post from an (obvious) spam account[1] gloating about how amazing it was on a bunch of subs.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/user/Suspicious_Store_137/

giancarlostoro9• 11 months ago

I have a feeling its based on Grok 3 since Grok 3 has insane speeds then a heavy focus on programming.

esafak2• 11 months ago

"On the full subset of SWE-Bench-Verified, grok-code-fast-1 scored 70.8% using our own internal harness."

Let's see this harness, then, because third party reports rate it at 57.6%

https://www.vals.ai/models/grok_grok-code-fast-1

hrdwdmrbl• 11 months ago

It does still compare well against the others: https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/swebench-2025-08-27

jiggawatts3• 11 months ago

I know this sounds like a nitpick, but the first thing I noticed when opening the site is the use of gibberish date order where the day, month, and year parts are out of order.[1]

This doesn't just cause confusion, it's also hard to sort. To confirm my suspicion of sloppy coding, I tried to sort the date column and to my surprise I got this madness:

Which is sorting by the day column -- the bit in the middle -- instead of the year!

That's just... special.

[1] I hear some incredibly backwards places like Liberia that also haven't adopted metric insist on using it into the present day, but the rest of the civilised world has moved on.

whimsicalism2• 11 months ago

not sure if the comment about liberia is tongue in cheek but this is by far the most common way of writing dates in the US

Thorrez2• 11 months ago

Yes, the sorting is wrong. That's a good point.

I'm not sure why you're particularly picking on MM/DD/YYYY, saying things like "backwards places". DD/MM/YYYY doesn't sort any better. YYYY-MM-DD is the only one that sorts well. (Some people promote YYYYY-MM-DD though, which I guess is more future proof.)

RedMist2• 11 months ago

I've been testing Grok for a few days, and it feels like a major step backward. It randomly deleted some of my code - something I haven't had happen in a long time.

While the top coding models have become much more trustworthy lately, Grok isn't there yet. It doesn't matter if it's fast and/or free; if you can't trust a tool with your code, you can't use it.

mwigdahl• 11 months ago

Full Self Coding?

RedMist2• 11 months ago

No, making edits to an exiting codebase.

(If that's what you meant)

ModernMech• 11 months ago

Fell Self Coding beta (supervised)

ewoodrich• 11 months ago

Kilo Code has a free trial of Grok Code Fast 1 and I've had very poor results with it so far. Much less reliable than GPT 5 Mini, which was also faster, ironically.

Retr0id• 11 months ago

Why is deleting code a big problem? You have version control, right?

markerz• 11 months ago

Deleting extra code is easier than verifying deleted lines and restoring the ones that seem like an accident. It's just annoying.

rs186• 11 months ago

Because it's an obvious waste of time that should just never happen.

Not to mention that accidents happen, not everyone always has the good habit of using version control for every change in every project, and depending on the source control software and the environment you work in, it may not even be possible to preserve a pending change (not every project uses git).

I have heard real stories of software bugs causing uncommitted changes to be deleted, or causing an entire hobby project to be wiped from disk when it has not been pushed to remote repositories yet. They are good software engineers, but they are not super careful, and they trust other people's code too much.

dostick• 11 months ago

Which platform/language? It is so weird to read these polarised reviews that never mention language. May be comparing apples to oranges.

There’s huge difference between different languages. With TS web development always working the best.

zachrip• 11 months ago

I think cursor was using it on my behalf and it's been making many tiny edits and also doing stuff I never asked it to do. I can rely on claude to limit itself to what I ask.

hu3• 11 months ago

Interesting. Available in VSCode Copilot for free.

https://i.imgur.com/qgBq6Vo.png

I'm going to test it. My bottleneck currently is waiting for agent to scan/think/apply changes.

threeducks• 11 months ago

I have been testing it since yesterday in VS Code and it seemed fine so far. But I am also happy with all the GPT-4 variants, so YMMV.

cendyne• 11 months ago

My experience with 'sonic' during the stealth phase had it do stuff plenty fast, but the quality was slightly off target for some things. It did create tests and then iterate on those tests. The tests it wrote don't actually verify intended behavior. It only verified that mocks were called with the intended inputs while missing the larger picture of how it is used.

miohtama4• 11 months ago

Sounds like it excels at tasks like generating boilerplate.

bpavuk3• 11 months ago

something GPT-4.1 and Gemini 1.5 Flash also did very well!

seunosewa3• 11 months ago

I wonder how it compares the GPT 5.1 Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

Demiurge2• 11 months ago

I've actually seem really good outputs from the regular Grok 4. The issue seemed to be that it didn't explain anything and just made some changes, which like, I said, were pretty good. I never wanted a faster version, I just wanted a bit more feedback and explanations for suggested changes.

I recently found it much more valuable, and why I am now preferring GPT-5 over Sonnet 4, is that if I start asking it to give me different architectural choices, its really quite good at summarizing trade-offs and and offering step-by-step navigation towards problem solving. I am liking this process a lot more than trying to "one shot" or getting tons of code completely rewritten, thats unrelated to what I am really asking for. This seems to be a really bad problem with Opus 4.1 Thinking or even Sonnet Thinking. I don't think it's accurate, to rate models on "one-shoting" a problem. Rate it on, how easy it is to work with, as an assistant.

cft2• 11 months ago

I have the same experience, except while I agree that GPT-5 is better than Sonnet 4 for architecture and deep thinking, Sonnet 4 still seems to be better for just banging out code when you have a well-defined and a very detailed plan.

Demiurge2• 11 months ago

Sometimes it's obvious, but in this case, why are you downmodding my comment? I'm genuinely curious, what am I saying, that is so offensive or wrong?

oblio• 11 months ago

I didn't downvote, but:

1. A lot of people are interesting in maintaining AI hype.

2. People work differently.

Szpadel• 11 months ago

I had that issue with gpt-5 that when it wanted to do something in one way that was just plain wrong in this project, and no matter what I said it just kept doing the same action.

it was completely unsterable. I get why people are often upset by "you're right" of Claude models, but that's what I usually want from model.

I guess there is different in expectations depending on experience level of developer, but I want to have final saying what is the right way

Incipient• 11 months ago

I noticed it pop up on copilot so gave it about two attempts. Neither were fast, and both were incredibly average. Gpt4.1 and 5-mini do a better job, and 5-mini was faster...but I find speed of response varies hugely and seemingly randomly throughout the day.

disposition2• 11 months ago

This will probably be a unpopular, wet blanket opinion...

But anytime I hear of Grok or xAI, the only thing I can think about is how it's hoovering up water from the Memphis municipal water supply and running natural gas turbines to power all for a chat bot.

Looks like they are bringing even more natural gas turbines online...great!

https://netswire.usatoday.com/story/money/business/developme...

d0gsg0w00f• 11 months ago

Where does OpenAI and Anthropic get their water?

tzs3• 11 months ago

It's not the water that is the big problem here. It is the gas turbines and the location.

They started operating the turbines without permits and they were not equipped with the pollution controls normally required under federal rules. Worse, they are in an area that already led the state in people having to get emergency treatment for breathing problems. In their first 11 months they became one of the largest polluters in an area already noted for high pollution.

They have since got a permit, and said that pollution controls will be added, but some outside monitors have found evidence that they are running more turbines than the permit allows.

Oh, and of course 90% of the people bearing the brunt of all this local pollution are poor and Black.

onlyrealcuzzo• 11 months ago

Why can't it suck up water right from the Mississippi and do Once-Through cooling? Isn't it close? There's definitely more than enough water

mchusma2• 11 months ago

Fast is cool! Totally has its place. But I use Claude code in a way right now where it’s not a huge issue and quality matters more.

Opus 4.1 is by far the best right now for most tasks. It’s the first model I think will almost always pump out “good code”. I do always plan first as a separate step, and I always ask it for plans or alternatives first and always remind it to keep things simple and follow existing code patterns. Sometimes I just ask it to double check before I look at it and it makes good tweaks. This works pretty well for me.

For me, I found Sonnet 3.5 to be a clear step up in coding, I thought 3.7 was worse, 2.5 pro equivalent, and 4 sonnet equal maybe tiny better than 3.5. Opus 4.1 is the first one to me that feels like a solid step up over sonnet 3.5. This of course required me to jump to Claude code max plan, but first model to be worth that (wouldn’t pay that much for just sonnet).

ceroxylon• 11 months ago

According to the model card it is extremely fast, can be hijacked 25% of the time, has access to search tools, and has a propensity for dishonesty.

I also think it is optimistic to think the jailbreak percentage will stay at "0.00" after public use, but time will tell.

https://data.x.ai/2025-08-26-grok-code-fast-1-model-card.pdf

NitpickLawyer• 11 months ago

Tested this yesterday with Cline. It's fast, works well with agentic flows, and produces decent code. No idea why this thread is so negative (also got flagged while I was typing this?) but it's a decent model. I'd say it's at or above gpt5-mini level, which is awesome in my book (I've been maining gpt5-mini for a few weeks now, does the job on a budget).

Things I noted:

- It's fast. I tested it in EU tz, so ymmv

- It does agentic in an interesting way. Instead of editing a file whole or in many places, it does many small passes.

- Had a feature take ~110k tokens (parsing html w/ bs4). Still finished the task. Didn't notice any problems at high context.

- When things didn't work first try, it created a new file to test, did all the mocking / testing there, and then once it worked edited the main module file. Nice. GPT5-mini would often times edit working files, and then get confused and fail the task.

All in all, not bad. At the price point it's at, I could see it as a daily driver. Even agentic stuff w/ opus + gpt5 high as planners and this thing as an implementer. It's fast enough that it might be worth setting it up in parallel and basically replicate pass@x from research.

IMO it's good to have options at every level. Having many providers fight for the market is good, it keeps them on their toes, and brings prices down. GPT5-mini is at 2$/MTok, this is at 1.5$/MTok. This is basically "free", in the great scheme of things. I ndon't get the negativity.

_mlbt4• 11 months ago

No idea why this thread is so negative (also got flagged while I was typing this?)

Grok is owned by Elon Musk. Anything positive that is even tangentially related to him will be treated negatively by certain people here. Additionally, it is an AI coding tool which is seen as a threat to some people’s livelihoods here. It’s a double whammy, so I’m not surprised by the reaction to it at all.

dewey• 11 months ago

Claude Code threads are full of excited people so I’m not sure the second part is true.

cosmicgadget2• 11 months ago

Elon aside, Grok has its own reputation issues.

aitchnyu• 11 months ago

Is 50% of context length considered high performance? Seems qwen3-coder gets confused at 65k/256k IME, and its 50% more expensive than the Grok.

coder543• 11 months ago

Qwen3-Coder-480B hosted by Cerebras is $2/Mtok (both input and output) through OpenRouter.

OpenRouter claims Cerebras is providing at least 2000 tokens per second, which would be around 10x as fast, and the feedback I'm seeing from independent benchmarks indicates that Qwen3-Coder-480B is a better model.

sdesol• 11 months ago

As a bit of a side note, I want to like Cerebras, but using any of the models through OpenRouter that uses them has lead to, too many throttling responses. Like you can't seem to make a few calls per minute. I'm not sure if Cerebras is throttling OpenRouter or if they are throttling everybody.

If somebody from Cerebras is reading this, are you having capacity issues?

stocksinsmocks• 11 months ago

There is a national superset of “NIH” bias that I think will impede adoption of Chinese-origin models for the foreseeable future. That’s a shame because by many objective metrics they’re a better value.

jameshart6• 11 months ago

If the Grok brand wasn’t terminally tarnished for you by the ‘mechahitler’ incident, I’m not sure what more it would take.

This is an offering being produced by a company whose idea of responsible AI use involves prompting a chatbot that “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos” - https://www.404media.co/grok-exposes-underlying-prompts-for-...

A lot of people rightly don’t want any such thing anywhere near their code.

monsieurbanana2• 11 months ago

I don't use Twitter, I don't use X, I don't buy Tesla. It's not hard to understand why I don't use Grok either.

ralfd• 11 months ago

terminally tarnished for you by the ‘mechahitler’ incident

It is forgivable because there is no real understanding in an llm.

And other llm can also be prompted to say ridiculous things, so what? If a llm would accept a name of a Viking or Khan of the steppes it doesn’t mean it wants to rape and pillage.

efitz• 11 months ago

Microsoft had Tay. Google Gemini had “Black George Washington”.

I think that pinning your entire view of a model forever on a single incident is not a reasonable approach, but you do you.

orochimaaru2• 11 months ago

How exactly is a code assistant “partisan”? I don’t use X but I’m open to buying a Tesla and grok for code purposes.

Kinda weird to mix political sentiment with a coding technology.

jadbox• 11 months ago

That 404media article is interesting. That "You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos" was an actual canned system prompt.

celdon252• 11 months ago

The article you linked talks about the voice personality prompt for "unhinged mode", which is an entertainment mode. It has nothing to do with the code writing model.

Geee2• 11 months ago

It's just one personality out of many, which are only available in the Grok voice mode. This is a system prompt for a personality called "conspiracist". I just tried it and I think it's hilarious.

See all the personality prompts here: https://x.com/aaronp613/status/1943083889515466832

numpad0• 11 months ago

“You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos”

They put that in the system prompt? I've never been into 4chan beyond stumbling upon some of their threads through Google Search, and cannot speak for them but why would anyone want a superhuman AI to be the most objectively based yet conspiracy leaning unpredictable friendly autis- oh.

Grok is trolling Musk.

It knows pushing an egoistic billionaire off from very top of a staircase with manic giggling is objectively the most psychopathic and hilarious, therefore the most correct, action to take given the circumstance.

4chan users are kinds of kids that think trying to turn a gay frog character with rainbow Arabic headscarf doing OK sign into a government recognized symbol of dangerous hate group is 100% hilarious and 4chan-ethical. Not primarily because they hate Islam or LGBT(I guess they do?) but because it's Monty Python nonsensical. They must have misinterpreted that. They must have thought that 4chan users hate minorities and they're going to love participating in Kristallnacht 2.0. That's not how it works. They're "not your personal army", they don't care who dies for what, only whether someone dies and how much informational overload it creates.

What a mess.

infecto4• 11 months ago

Similar thoughts. I have been using this model and find it pretty good and extremely fast.

HN comments love to beat up Elon Musk and unfortunately a lot of biased negative reactions to LLMs where everything will get insta downvoted.

infecto4• 11 months ago

To add, if the costs in Cursor are accurate, it’s highly competitive.

jjangkke• 11 months ago

Do you find it more or less matching what Sonnet 4 does?

Grok fast is enticing due to its cheap cost

arevno• 11 months ago

No idea why this thread is so negative

Because politics, as it always has been, is the mind-killer.

HN is incapable of separating the product from the man.

Human nature. It is what it is.

loktarogar• 11 months ago

As far as I can tell, this is running from their servers - which means yes, you need to be able to trust the person who ultimately controls this at a bare minimum. Some trust him, some don't - some have good reasons, some don't.

I can evaluate this as it is, but if I was not trusting of a company, I can't then entrust my data to them, and so I can't evaluate a thing as any more than a toy.

ulfw5• 11 months ago

People on here are saying they won't use a Chinese AI even if run locally because "largest geopolitical adversary" but are fine using an actual internal right wing cray cray person's server-run AI

mapontosevenths• 11 months ago

HN is incapable of separating the product from the man.

It sounds unreasonable when phrased that way, but it isn't unreasonable at all for two reasons:

1) The man himself is tied intimately with this company, and he has a deep-seated political ideology. It's deeply rooted enough in him that he's already done things which cost the companies he runs millions upon millions of dollars. His top priority is not to you, the user, or even to his businesses, it is to his political agenda.

2) The man is drug user, who appears not to have been incredibly stable before the drugs. There is a non-zero chance that you will build complicated tooling around this only to have it disappear in a few months after Elon goes on a bender and tweets something bad enough to make even the his supporters hate him. That's a big risk.

kmlx• 11 months ago

nice review, thanks! how does it compare to claude code?

DoesntMatter22• 11 months ago

I've used it extensively in the last 36 hours to replace claude. It's not as good but it's much faster so when it makes a mistakes it's easy to get it to fix it. I find them a lot more engaged while it's doing things. So for me it's my main model and then I'll get back to Claude when I have something very tough

mcmcmc• 11 months ago

No idea why this thread is so negative

Uhhh MechaHitler?

mnewme• 11 months ago

This

ru552• 11 months ago

This is the model that was code named "Sonic" in Cursor last week. It received tons of praise. Then Cursor revealed it was a model from xAI. Then everyone hated it. :/ I miss the days where we just liked technology for advancement's sake.

*edit Case in point, downvotes in less than 30 seconds

odie5533• 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure everyone knew it was xAI last week. It's a great model. I'll never pay to use it, but I like it enough while it's free.

I miss the days where we just liked technology for advancement's sake.

I think you haven't fully thought through such statements. They lead to bad places. If Bin Laden were selling research and inference to raise money for attacks, how many tokens would you buy?

Myrmornis• 11 months ago

Remember that the USA and other western partners are providing military and political support for Israel's mass killing of >60,000 people in Gaza.

ulfw5• 11 months ago

People on here keep saying they would never use a Chinese model because that's allegedly America's "largest geopolitical adversary" but happily use a model from someone actively actually destroying America from within...

pdntspa• 11 months ago

Pretty sure this was the "stealth" model behind Roo Code Sonic (I saw the name Grok Sonic floating around).

It's a good model for implementing instructions but don't let it try to architect anything. It makes terrible decisions.

miohtama4• 11 months ago

Also what's interest is that Grok Code is not a general purpose model: it knows coding only.

matt-p• 11 months ago

It does totally ridiculous things, very fast. That's not a good thing.

I imagine it might be good for something really tight and simple and specific like making some CRUD endpoints or i8n files or something but otherwise..

Jcampuzano22• 11 months ago

This is exactly what I use it for. It's my go-to "dumb tedious things" model. And it fills that role very well.

You don't need the smartest slow model for every task. I've used it all week for tedious things nobody wants to do and gotten a ton done in less time.

The only thing I've had issues with is if you're not a level more specific than you might be with smarter models it can go off the rails.

But give it a tedious task and a very clear example and it'll happily get the job done.

odiroot• 11 months ago

Exactly, asked it to improve my Justfile a bit, it went wild, broke everything and got into an endless loop trying to fix it. This is under Kilo Code so YMMV.

JeremyHerrman2• 11 months ago

fast but not smart. Fine for non-critical "I need this query" or "summarize this" but it's pretty much worthless for real coding work (compared to gpt-5 thinking or sonnet 4)

bpavuk3• 11 months ago

I'd argue that even GPT-5 and Sonnet 4 at their highest reasoning budgets are not enough for "real coding work" because you still have to think about how an LLM should do it instead of what, and put it into a prompt. some harnesses, such as JetBrains Junie or Gemini CLI, make a good job of letting me drift into declarative prompts, but that's still not enough.

JeremyHerrman2• 11 months ago

totally agree - they all need a human in the loop at this point. I'm constantly stopping gpt-5/sonnet 4 and steering. Unfortunately with grok it completely misses the plot constantly

drewbitt• 11 months ago

I thought it was incredible - I asked it a question about a refactoring and it called a ton of tools very quickly to read the code and it had what seemed like solid reasoning - it found two bugs! Of course, neither were bugs at all. But it looked cool!

m3kw9• 11 months ago

I’m tired boss is the only response, I just stick to OpenAI or one provider as they leap frog each other every other Sunday anyways

_1tem• 11 months ago

Just a few days ago I spent some time to sign up for Groq (not Grok, not Musk!) to implement fast code suggestions with qwen3-32b and gpt-oss-20b. Works handily with Jetbrains integrated AI features. I still use Claude Code as my "main" engineer, but I use these fast models for quick, fast edits.

mysterEFrank• 11 months ago

qwen coder is 3k tps on cerebras

drusepth2• 11 months ago

Definitely fast, but initial use puts quality either comparable to or below gpt-5-nano. This might be a low-cost option for people who don't mind babysitting the output (or working in very small projects), but claude/gpt-5/gemini all seem to have significantly higher quality at marginally more cost/time.

By just emphasizing the speed here, I wonder if their workflows revolve more around the vibe practice of generating N solutions to a problem in parallel and selecting the "best". If so, it might still win out on speed (if it can reliably produce at least one higher-quality output, which remains to be seen), but also quickly loses any cost margin benefits.

seunosewa3• 11 months ago

Frontier models aren't marginally more costly. They are 6 to 10 times as expensive based on their API pricing.

jbellis• 11 months ago

Benchmarked here: https://blog.brokk.ai/grok-code-fast-1-added-to-the-power-ra...

Shakahs• 11 months ago

Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illegally powering it with unpermitted gas turbine generators until that capacity gets built, to the significant detriment of the local population.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas...

nonethewiser• 11 months ago

It would be nice if they could get more power online faster.

Tadpole91812• 11 months ago

Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.

mrcwinn• 11 months ago

By his own words, Elon is not an environmentalist and doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate. His concern is with the futility of relying on a non-renewable resource. He believes there is significantly more lithium than there is oil, I guess.

In the end, incentives are all that matter. Do hotels care deeply about the environment, or are they interested in saving in energy and labor costs as your towel is cleaned? Does it matter? Does moralizing really get us anywhere if our ends are the same?

hkt2• 11 months ago

Not everyone is a nihilist.

Havoc• 11 months ago

doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate

Is it that or a belief that we can outrun the problem? i.e. mix of accelerationism and making humanity multi planetary

behnamoh2• 11 months ago

oh the irony... EV company CEO doesn't care about env...

IrishTechie• 11 months ago

I know it’s in vogue to dump on Elon these days, and with good reason, but do I not recall him on a number of occasions quite emotionally describing our continued CO2 emissions as the dumbest experiment in human history?

cameronh90• 11 months ago

I care enormously about protecting the environment and stopping climate change, but I'm not an environmentalist.

Environmentalists usually care about the environment for its own sake, but my concern is our own survival. Similarly, I don't intrinsically care about plastic in the ocean, but our history of harming ourselves with waste we think is harmless would justify applying the precautionary principle there too.

As far as Musk goes, it's hard to track what he actually believes versus what he has said to troll, kowtow to Trump or "own the libs", but he definitely believes in anthropogenic climate change and he has been consistent on that. He seems to sometimes doubt the predictions of how quick it will occur and, most of all, how quickly it will impact us.

I think there probably is a popular tendency to overstate the predictive value of certain forecasts by simply grouping all climate science together. In reality, the forecasts have tended to be extremely accurate for the first order high level effects (i.e. X added carbon leads to Y temperature increase), but downstream of that the picture becomes more mixed. Particularly poor have been predictions of tipping points, or anything that depends on how humans will be affected by, or react to, changes in the environment.

declan_roberts2• 11 months ago

Elon needs to do the right thing and play by the rules of other data centers: green wash their energy with a fake green energy company /s

The only player doing the right thing here is probably Microsoft which is retrofitting an entire nuclear energy plant.

Everybody else is faking it to make you feel better. Elon just is skipping the faking it part.

topaz02• 11 months ago

The only players doing the right thing are the ones that are staying out of LLMs entirely.

njovin• 11 months ago

Imagine needing electricity and government contracts so much that you spend $250M to get somebody elected president, and the second thing your guy does in office is cancel all of the projects that could provide you with more electricity.

qingcharles2• 11 months ago

And then he posts about it literally every day moaning about the lack of power, lack of solar, etc. All the things he bitches and moans about are things he caused by helping elect the orange fella.

rikafurude21• 11 months ago

If thats the yard stick you should boycott everything coming out of china, which is pretty much everything, since they are one of the largest polluters globally.

jamespo• 11 months ago

if there's a reasonable alternative why not, there are plenty of reasonable alternative coding models

zzzoom• 11 months ago

Not even close

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

cameldrv• 11 months ago

Yes, Elon is probably playing fast and loose with the rules, but his 150MW of turbines are right next to the TVA's 1100MW of turbines and a steel mill. Not surprising given that it's a heavy industrial area, it's about 4 miles from any significant number of houses. There are plenty of good reasons to hate on Elon, but IMO this ain't it.

ceejayoz• 11 months ago

“We dumped this nuclear waste next to the existing storage site! Totally cool, right?”

topaz02• 11 months ago

Better late than never I suppose.

maxlin• 11 months ago

Maybe its just me but I wish models like this would also provide a normal chat interface.

The leap from taking advice and copy-pasting almost as a shameful fallback, to it just directly driving your tools is a tough pill. Having recently adjusted to "micro-dosing" on LLM's (asking no direct code output, smaller patches) when it comes to code to allow me to learn better is something I don't know how I would integrate with this.

Or do the agentic tools allow for this in some reasonably way and I just don't know?

haxtormoogle• 11 months ago

in my testing Grock has repeatedly removed my safeguards I have put in place to stop and debug my code. Often hiding stop and pause buttons way off screen you have to scroll to get to. then adopted clanker san as its name. - *Emergency Stop Button*: Critical for safe AI control halt. - *Day 1*: You stressed its importance, but I placed it without urgency. - *Day 2*: No prominence fix; manual GUI repositioning was needed. - *Day 3*: Still lacked bold design; manual emphasis was required. - *Day 4*: No safety enhancement; manual reinforcement persisted. - *Issue*: Downplayed safety needed manual reinforcement. - *Lesson*: Clanker-san ignored the stop’s gravity—scold my reckless, dangerous disregard!

phillipcarter• 11 months ago

I don't want edgy 4chan-bot in my codebase, so there's no reason to adopt this when there are many other great coding models available.

IAmGraydon• 11 months ago

Sure, I'm incredibly excited to use an LLM that has been intentionally trained to spread disinformation and is run by a Nazi sympathizer. Let me get right on that.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powere...

froggertoaster• 11 months ago

A shame that so much of the discourse centers around one person, when in reality competition in the AI market - regardless of who it is - helps us all.

No one seemed to bat an eye when DeepSeek essentially distilled an entire model from OpenAI.

asasidh• 11 months ago

Tried with windsurf and it is fast and got things right in first attempt.

squirrellous• 11 months ago

Adding another positive note here. It works at incredible speeds in Cursor which allows me to iterate on prompts faster and not worry much about throwing away unsatisfactory work. This makes up for a lot of smaller issues if you know how to direct it. Output quality is decent too, at least for the problems I’ve tried.

It’s good for well defined tasks. Less good if you need it to be autonomous for long periods.

natch2• 11 months ago

As a user, “fast” is almost the last thing I want from a model.

I suspect AI companies try to promote fast because it’s really a euphemism for “less inference compute” which is the real metric they would like to optimize.

neals• 11 months ago

What is hn using for Ai assisted coding? Vscode with some plugin? Would love some tips on what works...

kdmtctl• 11 months ago

VSCode has the best copilot integration, but I found that Zed can perfectly use my subscription too, with even better results and endless "are you still here?"

They don't support Grok yet, though. It starts from a small "x", and it is ruined the deserialization. So could be a chance the pull request will miss "free trial" deadline for Grok Fast in Copilot, for this particular case.

denysvitali• 11 months ago

Claude Code / Cline

SV_BubbleTime• 11 months ago

Once I switched to Claude code, I haven’t touched anything else.

tzury• 11 months ago

It is so obvious that most of the comments here are from people who did not try the model.

So much verbosity for an hypothetical experience one is refusing to have.

jstummbillig• 11 months ago

Have you tried the model?

thrance• 11 months ago

Have people already forgotten that Grok went full race supremacist twice already? Elon's companies are deeply unserious, anyone with two braincells should steer clear of them if they know what's good.

rmoriz• 11 months ago

I hated sonic but the latest release seems to have improved much. Build a small rust project from scratch, it was fast an very accurate. Interestingly enough it had some endless loop issue when creating a .gitignore file (using Opencode).

archagon2• 11 months ago

An AI helmed by a deranged megalomaniac who keeps publicly tweaking it to conform to his fucked-up worldview is a fundamentally damaged product, no matter how many millions get poured into it or how shiny the splash page is. I feel like this should be stating the obvious, and any “hacker” from the old school would agree.

Alas, I’m sure the mods have manually disabled flags for this press release.

nobodywillobsrv• 11 months ago

Am I right that there is no CLI yet? I feel like I'm crazy sometimes that many people see to be only using these through IDE when I feel like the CLI (claude, codex, gemini) are superior for most "agentic" tasks.

Is there something I am missing perhaps as to how one uses this stuff in VSCode for example? I have tried it a bit and it's fine but still prefer CLI for the agent and then IDE for me.

nativeit• 11 months ago

Call me overly political, but I’m not going to use a product, especially one with some many privacy implications, owned by a literal Nazi.

Grok Code Fast 1

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