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Grok 4

simonwillison.net

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Re: Grok 4

#221

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dotancohen wrote: post #212
aliljet wrote: post #18

[edit to focus on pricing, leaving praise of Simon's post out despite being deserved] Simon claims, 'Grok 4 is competitively priced. It's $3/million for input tokens and $15/million for output tokens - the same price as Claude Sonnet 4.' This ignores the real price which skyrockets with thinking tokens. This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. The tokens it's burning…

> This is a classic weird tesla-style pricing tactic at work. The price is not what it seems. How is that "tesla-style pricing"? When I bought my Tesla the price was exactly what they told me it would be. Contrast that with every other car I've bought new, especially the Ford Focus for which the salesman tried to haggle me for more options and told me he thinks we should raise the price a bit "to make sure it gets ap…

Tesla has sometimes presented the price with "gas savings" deducted from the price, in a slightly misleading attempt to get people to consider the total cost of ownership. I'm assuming that is what is being referred to.

Re: Grok 4

#222

Post by oc1 »

zaptrem wrote: post #7

Claude Code converted me from paying $0 for LLMs to $200 per month. Any co that wants a chance at getting that $200 ($300 is fine too) from me needs a Claude Code equivalent and a model where the equivalent's tools were part of its RL environment. I don't think I can go back to pasting code into a chat interface, no matter how great the model is.

Same. The moment anthropic covered claude code with their max subscription i switched over. I don't care about general ai and their chat interfaces. I need the best specialized battle-tested tools that proved to solve the problems i have and not some generic ai chat interface that tries to build me some half-baked script in a minute which i have to debug. I will pay 200€ for an end-user niche product like claude code that solves reliably my niche problems but i won't even pay 20€ for chatgpt or claude chat.

Re: Grok 4

#223

Post by joaogui1 »

manca wrote: post #181

Elon mentioned that Grok's 4 image and video understanding capabilities are somewhat limited and he suggested a new version of the foundation model is being trained to address these issues. According to the "Humanity's Last Exam" benchmark, though, it seems to perform reasonably well, if not the best among the SOTA models. I agree, though - the timing of the release is a bit unfortunate and it felt like rushed a bit,…

They used a text-only subset of HLE

Re: Grok 4

#224

Post by manutreebot »

rozap wrote: post #120
pron wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to use an LLM for coding, so let me ask you a question. The other day I had to write some presumably boring serialization code, and I thought, hmm, I could probably describe the approach I want to take faster than writing the code, so it would be great if an LLM could generate it for me. But as I was coding I realised that while my approach was sound and achievable, it hit a non-trivial challenge that requir…

It would write incorrect code and then you'd need to go debug it, and then you would have to come to the same conclusion that you would have come to had you written it in the first place, only the process would have been deeply frustrating and would feel more like stumbling around in the dark rather than thinking your way through a problem and truly understanding the domain. In the instance of getting claude to fix c…

I have been seeing this sort of mindset frequently in response to agentic / LLM coding. I believe it to be incorrect. Coding agents w Claude 4 Opus are far more useful and accurate than these comments suggest. I use LLMs everyday in my job as a performance engineer at a big company to write complex code. It helps a ton.

The caveat is that user approach makes all the difference. You can easily end up with these bad experiences if you use it incorrectly. You need to break down your task into manageable chunks of moderate size/complexity, and then specify all detail and context rigorously, almost to the level of pseudocode, and then re-prompt any misunderstandings (and fail fast and restart if LLM misunderstands). You get an intuition for how to best communite with the LLM. There’s a skill and learning curve to using LLMs for coding. It is a different type of workflow. It is unintuitive that this would be true, (that one would have to practice and get better at using them) and that’s why I think you see takes waving off LLMs so often.

Re: Grok 4

#225

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #153

Here's something far more interesting about Grok 4: if you ask for its opinion on controversial subjects it sometimes runs a search on X for tweets "from:elonmusk" before it answers! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

[deleted]

Re: Grok 4

#226

Post by oc1 »

pron wrote: post #66
zaptrem wrote: post #7

Claude Code converted me from paying $0 for LLMs to $200 per month. Any co that wants a chance at getting that $200 ($300 is fine too) from me needs a Claude Code equivalent and a model where the equivalent's tools were part of its RL environment. I don't think I can go back to pasting code into a chat interface, no matter how great the model is.

I've yet to use an LLM for coding, so let me ask you a question. The other day I had to write some presumably boring serialization code, and I thought, hmm, I could probably describe the approach I want to take faster than writing the code, so it would be great if an LLM could generate it for me. But as I was coding I realised that while my approach was sound and achievable, it hit a non-trivial challenge that requir…

No, we're not at this stage. This is exactly the reason why so many of us say that this tools are dangerous in the hands of inexperienced developers. Claude Code will usually try to please you instead of challenging your thoughts. It will also say it did x when in reality it did something slightly else.

Re: Grok 4

#227

Post by falcor84 »

econ wrote: post #188
dmix wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask an LLM a question and get different answers every time I just asked Grok 4 via Cursor (it requires subscription otherwise) > Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only. >> (Thought for 1m 44s) >> Neither.

That's some next level PC

I'd say that it's PC 101

Re: Grok 4

#228

Post by Karrot_Kream »

jswny wrote: post #205
vessenes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an extensive user of both. aider was the best a few months ago -- claude code is substantially more performant and easier to work with as a dev, regardless of aider's underlying model. Between claude code and gemini, you can really feel the difference in the tool training / implementation -- Anthropic's ahead of the game here in terms of integrating a suite of tools for claude to use. When I have a difficult prob…

Have you tried the codex CLI? And how does it compare to those other CLI agents if so?

The Codex CLI feels a lot more unpolished than the others. If you look at the repo's commit history, they're in the middle of a rewrite. The CLI often tries to involve calls on the Codex model using APIs that don't exist anymore. It's a mess.

It is model agnostic however.

Re: Grok 4

#229

Post by dockercompost »

oc1 wrote: post #226
pron wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to use an LLM for coding, so let me ask you a question. The other day I had to write some presumably boring serialization code, and I thought, hmm, I could probably describe the approach I want to take faster than writing the code, so it would be great if an LLM could generate it for me. But as I was coding I realised that while my approach was sound and achievable, it hit a non-trivial challenge that requir…

No, we're not at this stage. This is exactly the reason why so many of us say that this tools are dangerous in the hands of inexperienced developers. Claude Code will usually try to please you instead of challenging your thoughts. It will also say it did x when in reality it did something slightly else.

Do you have proof on that last statement?

Re: Grok 4

#230

Post by oc1 »

dockercompost wrote: post #229
oc1 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we're not at this stage. This is exactly the reason why so many of us say that this tools are dangerous in the hands of inexperienced developers. Claude Code will usually try to please you instead of challenging your thoughts. It will also say it did x when in reality it did something slightly else.

Do you have proof on that last statement?

Well, i worked +300 hours with Claude Code, and this also a pretty common experience by many others, not just me.
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