# Cursor Acquired: GrokBot, Origin, and AI Coding Shift

**Podcast:** How I AI
**Published:** 2026-08-18

## Transcript

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 going to go through all the releases from the Cursor, XAI, SpaceX, whatever, the Elon cinematic universe of code builders and model builders.
We're going to go through all their products, and I'm going to tell you what I think of GrokBot, Origin, the new GitHub competitor from Cursor, as well as the Grok model.
Let's get to it.
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I'm going to start with the most accessible product on our list today, GrokBot.
In case you missed it, the cursor slash xai team released GrokBot, which is a chat style agent in a desktop in mobile app that you can use to do knowledge work for you.
It's very similar to an opiclaw, 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 earnest over about the past week.
And I think there are some pros to GrokBot, and 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 ProdyMcProd, 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 GrokBot that monitors all my data for chat parity and tells me trends that I should pay attention to.
So I think the magic of GrokBot, if I had to tell you one thing that is the magic of GrokBot, 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 two Gmails, you can connect two Gmails.
If you're in seven 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 address 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 four email addresses connected to Gmail.
I have my chat parody one and a couple other business ones that I'm working on.
Having all four of these connected and being able to traverse all those accounts in GrokBot is a killer feature.
Just thank you to the Cursor slash 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.
GrokBot 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 chat PRD plugin.
And really, I've been using GrokBot 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 GrokBot comes with a computer.
And so you can actually go into this virtual machine and this is Proddy 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 a 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 GrokBot?
Well, I will say setting up a GrokBot is 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 it's 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 open claws, they are chaotic and technical and impossible to use and high maintenance.
And I love them.
I love them.
GrabBot, I have a little bit less control over.
I manage them a little bit less tightly.
And so I love them less.
You're not like my children.
The joy is in the challenge.
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 as if out of clay my agents.
I like that experience.
I don't think everybody else does.
So if you're looking for that highly tunable, highly hackable, highly transparent setup for your agent, GrokBot 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.
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 sounds a lot like Claude Slop, is I just know vibes.
Just know 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 open claws to be.
exactly who I want to talk to, what 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, 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 of use cases that I think you could use GrapBot for.
Again, I like to make my agents have roles.
So I've made a PM one.
I made a 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.
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.
I will continue to share ones and I will let you know if I decide I'm going to migrate any of my open claws over to GrockBot.
If you want me to move over, SpaceX team, just make GrokBot 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 TLDR, super simple, great connectors.
Use your agents as employees.
And if you like a bad time, stay with OpenClaw.
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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 code base inside the app.
So if you're in the Cursor web app or you're in the desktop app.
You're really talking about code base, 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 a 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 primitive 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 the Cursor CLI.
So it's Git.
We're all stuck with Git.
We've agreed on Git.
Now have we agreed on GitHub?
And it seems like the tides are turning.
But Cursor's bet is that we are going to want a...
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, CICD 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 code base 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.
Yes, in theory, this has been kind of redesigned.
You can see here, like, there's some nice things about how bug bot feedback has been shown or how cursor feedback has been shown.
It has some like smart little suggestions at the top that are nice.
But at the end of the day, this is just like GitHub with maybe less features, 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 add cursor here and ask it to fix the Vercel preview.
ranch issue please why is it failing because this is failing I can do that nope 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 and a 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 I've spent an hour with it, two 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 two products.
I would say I like GrokBot.
I have not yet seen the light on Origin.
The last thing we're going to 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.
Not sure if I'd love it, but that means we give it a try.
And You know, we're going to put benchmarks aside.
Everybody picks the benchmarks that they like.
I want to talk about the How I AI Vibe Review for anybody who is new.
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 a eval for a very complicated claims adjudication wireframe that has a lot of complex interaction.
So those are two new things that we added to the How I AI.
ViBenge.
And then we ran Grok 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 clairweighted 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 favorite 5.6 soul beating out both Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 on the Claire Index.
I am not surprised by this.
I do love GPT 5.6 whole.
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 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 open claw agent chit chat experience.
This always wins.
I know Sonnet 5 and 4.
Very pithy, AI back and forth, open claw 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's 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 Grok 4.6.
That was not those two 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 question I was trying to answer in this benchmark is, can it follow explicit design instruction?
And GPT-56 Sol and Grok both followed my instructions well and did a relatively good non-slop job of following instructions.
GPT-56 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 5-6.
We saw some clean designs out of Claude Sonnet 5.
And my favorite one was actually this design from 4-6, which is Claude Slop 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, love 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 two that bubbled up to the top were, again, 5.6 Soul.
as well as 4.6.
Now, what's really funny about this, again, this is 70% my taste, 30% the LLM as 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-56 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.
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 Cursor's Harness, its investment in new ways of thinking about things like Git, and fun products like GrokBot, I would say it's time for all of us to maybe become some level of a GrokBoy.
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 Grok, Grok, Grok.
Thanks for joining this mini episode of How I AI.
I want to hear from you, whether you love GrokBot, if you think cursor is going to replace GitHub, and whether or not you've switched to Grok for any of your coding tasks.
See you soon.
Thanks so much for watching.
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