Grok Coding Agent

Grok Coding Agent

Use Grok Build CLI only after the user or active workflow explicitly selects it as the external executor.

Minimal Workflow

1. Set <launcher> to grok, its absolute path, or a user-provided Grok wrapper. Do not substitute the generic agent alias. Preserve a provided wrapper; it may inject model, authentication, or permission settings, including bypass permissions. Treat wrappers as opaque: discover their contract only by invoking <launcher> --version or <launcher> --help; do not run inspection commands that may print an alias or function definition, open or print wrapper source, or dump its environment because it may contain credentials.
2. Run <launcher> --help before composing version-sensitive flags. Use model listing or subcommand help only when needed.
3. Choose the model and thinking effort deliberately, following the guidance below and the choices currently exposed by the launcher.
4. Use monitor mode by default for any task that may take time. Use final mode only when the task is clearly trivial and short.
5. Run from the intended repository or workspace, pass a bounded task contract, and wait for the external process to finish.
6. Inspect the resulting diff, tests, and final answer before claiming success.

Model and Effort

Honor explicit model or effort choices. Otherwise inspect current help and the current account's model list before launching:

• For routine, bounded work, prefer a balanced model and moderate effort.
• For deep review, ambiguous debugging, cross-module design, or other high-risk work, prefer a frontier model and high or maximum supported effort.
• Use the highest tier only when its quality benefit justifies the extra latency or cost, and after checking whether that tier has additional behavior.

Do not hardcode model names or effort levels from this skill; the launcher's current help and model list are authoritative.

Monitor Mode (Default)

When current help exposes streaming-messages-json, use it without requesting partial messages and select the sandbox for the task:

# Review, explanation, or other read-only work
<launcher> --output-format streaming-messages-json --sandbox read-only --always-approve -p "Your task"

# Approved implementation in the workspace
<launcher> --output-format streaming-messages-json --sandbox workspace --always-approve -p "Your task"

Start the command with the host's long-running process facility. Keep the task ID returned by the host, then use the host's wait, poll, or resume facility to read only newly available output while the process runs.

Reduce the stream to small liveness signals such as:

running — process alive
working — Read completed
running — no new semantic event; process alive
completed

Ignore raw thinking/reasoning and token deltas. Do not add --include-partial-messages for ordinary monitoring. Treat the terminal result together with process exit as completion evidence; do not kill a live process merely because it has produced no recent semantic event. If the preferred format is unavailable, use the filtered fallback in the monitoring reference.

Final Mode

For a clearly trivial, short task, use the same task-appropriate sandbox without a streaming output format and wait for the final response:

<launcher> --sandbox read-only --always-approve -p "Your task"

Task Boundaries

• Use a read-only sandbox and read-only prompt for review or explanation. Use workspace only for tasks expected to edit files.
• Treat permission approval and sandboxing as separate controls. Follow current help and preserve wrapper behavior, including intentional bypass settings.
• Treat plugin-collision, hook-parse, and similar configuration warnings as non-blocking only when the terminal result and process exit both show success. Report them once without retrying; diagnose the source configuration separately if they affect behavior.
• Do not disable memory, subagents, or web search by default; narrow them only when the task requires it.
• Do not silently create worktrees, commit, push, deploy, or widen task scope.
• Put optional captures in the system temporary directory. Cleanup is optional.

For event mapping, terminal-state handling, wrapper details, and current capability discovery, read references/monitoring.md.