lauren

in case you missed it over the weekend, grok @bot can help with your finances! combined with the other connectors available in grok bot you can build custom dashboards for your business, budgeting tools for you and your family, and even find more ways to save you money try looking through all the subs you pay for and forgot about and save and make money today with grok bot!

very excited to share one of my favorite new features! grok @bot is now multiplayer. make a team bot which has access to your plugins, skills, credentials, and then add it to slack with one click. it's super easy! guess what i named my bot 🤪 i love chatting with it and firing off cloud agents much more to come

this has become one of my most used prompts recently: > restate in your own words what you think my goals are and what the problem i'm trying to solve is

you can now talk to grok @bot in chatgpt

okay now that we're past that tired discussion, let's talk about how we get agents to write more correct code (note: this won't mean the code will be Good, but it should at least work) this is the entrypoint into your most basic agentic loop: verification. it means giving your agent the ability to verify its own work, most commonly by actually running and interacting with it like a real user would. whether your interface is a cli/api/ui/whatever, you want to start here so that your agents can close the loop. if you want you can even have your agents model the problem in TLA+ and attempt to verify if you have things like state machine bugs. the point is to give yourself confidence in the agents' work by them producing some kind of artifact that proves that 1) that the work is correct, 2) that it matches what you intended, and 3) is easier to review than reading the whole PR. most commonly this would be a video and/or screenshots for UI work. everything else like skill packs are really bonus and optional, all you need is a way for your agents to verify their own work to start using them more autonomously. some caveats are that not all domains can be verified easily yet, and that verification is just approximation and can still be wrong. it's no different than trusting that a human actually ran the code they wrote and trusting it so start here!

this is fixed and released in 0.70.2! rolling out now

had a lot of fun chatting with @petergyang about our grok @bot setups!

happy grok @bot day

this month i joined the four comma club

build trebuchets while others build moats

volume does matter look, i get it. if you were an engineer before agents came along, you're rightfully skeptical about lines of code and number of PRs being used as a metric for any kind of productivity. and i agree! or at least, i used to. for ease of explanation i will talk about this from the perspective as being an engineer on a large team of at least 50. volume didn't matter before because we focused on impact. you could have high impact even with a few PRs: for example you could make a one line config change and save the company millions of dollars. but before agents, the times where i saw volume come into the conversation were for the outliers. on the negative end you might have someone who is struggling to perform, on the other end you might have someone who was a "coding machine" archetype. a coding machine was someone who could just lock themselves in a room and emerge with a stack of PRs that solve a huge number of problems. so volume did matter, but only at the tail ends of the distribution, and combined with impact. if you've ever worked at a large tech company before, you'll get what i mean. the thing about agents is that big tech co problems are now small-medium co problems as well. how do agents change this calculus? well, everyone now has the ability to become a coding machine. you have incredibly capable frontier models that can write code better than any of us, at a rate much faster than we can. in this world, if you're still producing the same number of PRs as before, why wouldn't you pause to wonder why you're not being more productive? alien intelligence is here, and yet you can't outship a human coding machine? this brings me back to why i keep talking about trust (https://x.com/poteto/status/2102050467505430555). if you haven't put in the work to trust your agent's output, it is very difficult to scale up your productivity. and yes, this approach does require more tokens, but i think about this in terms of cost per intelligence. before agents, this cost was very high - you needed to hire many software engineers with high 6 figure salaries to do the work. tokens are still expensive today, but are likely to get cheaper over time (https://x.com/theo/status/2107924138094703084) factoring in the cost of intelligence. what looks exorbitant today will likely be affordable in 6 moths to a year. a single engineer with agents can do the work of tens if not hundreds of engineers, at a fraction of the cost. the reality that i don't think has hit yet is that job of the software engineer has truly changed. our job is not merely to produce software any longer (well tbh it was never only about the code, but bear with me for the sake of the explanation), but the machine that writes the software. this idea of a software factory, or a Michelin kitchen as i like to call it, is still a topic of research. and it's the type of stuff i like to share, not to flex, but to show you what's possible when you put a lot of rigor into using agents at scale

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