As a Grok maxi user that uses Grok for everything that’s not coding, I’m very happy to see them catching up. Surprised it’s not Grok 5 which Musk teased a while ago.
What I’m missing from this announcement is the capability to use connectors and tools. I don’t really get it - NONE of the frontier assistants can use tools / connectors while in voice mode - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. It seems so obvious: I want to be able to research stuff, pull up documents, jot down notes and do productive work while I’m talking to it, and not end voice mode whenever I need to connect to an app or service.
It’s weird. The old Claude voice mode WAS able to use tools but when they revamped it, it lost that capability and is now pinned to Haiku :(
So, yay for finally a voice mode that’s powered by a frontier model and hopefully as good as Grok voice, but sad to still not see tool use while in voice mode.
(I haven’t tried it yet, only read the announcement)
Also spent the past day using Fable for everything I usually use Opus or gpt-5.5 for. My experience is that it’s a better and more reliable Opus that’s far better in frontend tasks than backend/ios. More similar to gpt-5.5 for long running tasks and reliability.
It still left small bugs and weird behaviors that it cleaned up when I told it about them, but it felt very Opus-ey.
I think for implementing a detailed design doc, I’d put it on par with gpt-5.5 high but farrrr more expensive. I’m eating through my x5 Max plan in no time. I’d use it for reviewing implementations and designs docs as another pass, but it’s too expensive for me for reading a lot of (uncached) code by itself in an agentic loop, especially with medium to high reasoning.
As a daily driver too expensive, that crown still goes to gpt-5.5.
I barely used it in high/xhigh/max reasoning though.
Can we stop with this way of installing things? This is already on brew and it’s a menu bar app. Just let me download it instead of executing some arbitrary bash script
As much as I like Gemini CLI and don’t like them shutting it down, I think it’s good some of the offerings are getting unified. There was too much fragmentation in the google offering and this is making it a tiny bit better.
I'm talking about the consumer Grok app and grok.com website. There currently are not connected apps (or MCP) at all, so while Grok can use tools, there is no way to add tools to it
I also think Grok would benefit from allowing usage of "SuperGrok Heavy" (their $300 plan) in coding harnesses with included usage. Currently they give you some API credits on the Heavy plan so you can use some Grok for coding, but $300 USD value is just not there.
Not saying they should create their own grok-code harness, just allowing usage in existing ones would already be beneficial. But that's probably what the Cursor acquisition is going to do eventually
Grok is my favorite model for chatting, and my favorite voice mode. It seems to be the only voice mode that isn't routing to a extremely cheap model (like Haiku), and has been the highest quality out of all the frontier ones. When you subscribe to SuperGrok you can also create a "council" of agents, each with their own system prompt and when you ask something, they will all get asked in parallel to come to a conclusion. Good stuff!
Just wish they would finally put some work into their apps, it's the only thing keeping me from actually subscribing to SuperGrok:
- No MCP / connected apps support. It's been teased but here we are, still not available. I can't connect Grok to anything, so I can't use it for serious work
- Projects are still not available in the app so as soon as you move something into a project, it's gone from all the native apps
- No way to add artifacts (like generated markdown docs) directly to a project, we have to export to PDF/markdown and re-import. And there isn't even a way to export artifacts. This makes serious project work hard because we can't dynamically evolve projects with new information
- No memory, no ability to look up other chats, each chat is completely new
- No voice mode in projects at all
If someone from xAI is reading this, please consider adding some of these.
I'm also a Claude Code user from day 1 here, back from when it wasn't included in the Pro/Max subscriptions yet, and I was absolutely not aware of this either. Your explanation makes sense, but I naively was also under the impression that re-using older existing conversations that I had open would just continue the conversation as is and not be a treated as a full cache miss.
My biggest learning here is the 1 hour cache window. I often have multiple Claudes open and it happens frequently that they're idle for 1+ hours.
This cache information should probably get displayed somewhere within Claude Code
It took me a while to understand what this is, but if I understand it right it's a OpenClaw you can run on your Mac Mini, to then use through the Perplexity Computer interface (which is their hosted OpenClaw version that you costs credits)
So a more polished OpenClaw that integrates with Perplexity?
In general interesting, if it's not just limited to Mac Minis. Would love to put this on my VPS that's currently running OpenClaw