I use Grok pretty heavily, and Elon doesn't factor into it any more than Sam and Sundar do when I use GPT and Gemini. A few use cases where it really shines:
* Research and planning
* Writing complex isolated modules, particularly when the task depends on using a third-party API correctly (or even choosing an API/library at its own discretion)
* Reasoning through complicated logic, particularly in cases that benefit from its eagerness to throw a ton of inference at problems where other LLMs might give a shallower or less accurate answer without more prodding
I'll often fire off an off-the-cuff message from my phone to have Grok research some obscure topic that involves finding very specific data and crunching a bunch of numbers, or write a script for some random thing that I would previously never have bothered to spend time automating, and it'll churn for ~5 minutes on reasoning before giving me exactly what I wanted with few or no mistakes.
As far as development, I personally get a lot of mileage out of collaborating with Grok and Gemini on planning/architecture/specs and coding with GPT. (I've stopped using Claude since GPT seems interchangeable at lower cost.)
For reference, I'm only referring to the Grok chatbot right now. I've never actually tried Grok through agentic coding tooling.