Grok Bot vs. OpenClaw: How I replaced my entire agent stack

Today I'm going to talk about what everybody else is talking about these days. Grockbot. Yes, I did an episode lovingly entitled Grock, Grock, Grock, where I gave you my high level overview of Grockbot, the new Grock models, and origin cursors new GitHub replacement. But today I'm going to talk specifically about Grockbot. After several weeks of working with Grockbot, I have to tell you the truth. I have killed all my open claws and moved almost entirely to Grockbot. In this episode, I'm just going to show you a couple very practical use cases of Grockbot. Why I think it's better right now than some of the open claws I was running. What is still missing and what I can't wait for you to try? This is going to be a totally hands-on mini episode with bot ideas. You can steal. We will put the bot links in the bot templates in the show notes. And I hope this is a really specific way to get you up and running in your life a little bit better with Grockbot. 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Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at WorkOS.com. Start building today. Okay, quickly before we get into use cases, let's just remind you of exactly what Grockbot is. Grockbot is the new multi-agent platform from the SpaceX AI team, which is really positioned as AI teammates you can give real work. And this has been my experience. You all know I love multiple open clause. I love to name my agent specific names and give them specific jobs. And Grockbot has a very similar feel where you can define agents, give them jobs, and assign them work to do. Looking at Grockbot, there's just a couple things that I think you need to know. First of all, Grockbot is very simple. It looks a little bit like I message a little bit like terminal with just a couple affordances that make it nice to write code and have computer use. But there are a couple key primitives of Grockbot I think is important to know as you get started. First are the Grocks, the bots? I don't know what we call them. I'm going to call them bots, the bots. As you can see on the left hand of my screen, you can define individual agents to create an agent. You just click this plus sign, and then you can either search your existing bots. Look, I was correct. They're called bots capital B, or you can create a new bot. Fun fact, if you create a new bot with a specific name, it will infer from that bot's name what its job is. So if you like me created one of your first bots named PradiMickProd, it's going to understand that it's probably going to work with you on products. So you can see here, I've named a couple bots, but these are sort of the threads, the agents, the individual defined scope, and the context that you're going to be working with. And just general recommendation, I really like, again, this bot as colleague, bot as co-worker, bot per job framework. So this is why it works really well with my mindset. Is I like to hire my bots like a hire people for specific jobs and with specific names, and that is the kind of like fundamental way that rock bot words. The second thing that you need to know about rock bot are plugins. So plugins are combinations of skills and connectors that allow you to interact with different parts of your stack. And the most common integrations and plugins that you're going to use are going to be these productivity ones. So you can see the ones I've added at the top, your Gmail calendar, Google Drive, I have Grinola, GitHub, Century, ChatParity, I have a bunch of them. This is where I fell in love with rock bot. The connector experience is really good. One, because you'll rarely go into this screen. You will rarely, I'm showing you this screen because I'm trying to give you the world tour of rock bot. But you'll rarely have to actually explicitly go into the rock bot screen and set up plugins. Often your bot will just prompt you to connect the plugins that it needs. And then you go through a really easy OAuth flow and then you're off to the races. The other thing I love about rock bot and I called this out in my earlier review is that you can connect multiple accounts per plugin. And again, thank you SpaceX AI team for this killer feature where I have six email addresses. I actually have more than this. I probably have 10. They can all be connected. My rock bot can switch and move between all of them super simple. In case you missed it, open AI released multi-gmail calendar and drive. I think don't quote me connectors for codecs and work. So I see some of these other harnesses kind of like picking up on how important this is. But especially as an entrepreneur that runs multiple businesses, the ability to connect multiple slacks, multiple liners, multiple gmails, all those sorts of things, having super helpful. And it's just really elegant the way that these connectors are done. The final thing that you need to know is that a rock bot has a computer and it has routines. So every rock bot has a virtual machine in which it can do work. This means you can log into websites. It means you can install things. You can run cogeneration. You can run repose locally. So it does have its own computer that you can actually click into and yourself run. This runs in the cloud. So if you switch like me to grokbot on your phone, you'll have continuity of tasks, which is really nice. And then it has routines, which is just scheduled times it does stuff for you. So when I talk to you about how I design my rock bots, I'm going to show you how I define them, what routines I give them, how I work with them, and then how we use plug-in and computer to get jobs done. Now, the caveat that I want everybody to hear, including the bot product team, is these are still single player. This is the one thing we're an Eve agent, which I've done an episode on or an open cloud, which I've done many episodes on, really still wins is you can't put a rock bot in the group chat. And I want a rock bot in the group chat. Once you get addicted to the bot, you want to share this with other people. They have a release day, share a bot template feature in the past week, where you can share your bot with your team, and they can have the same instructions and routines and stuff like that. But it's just not the same as a single bot between two folks chatting with it. I really look forward to that feature from the team whenever they get it live. Okay, so that is those are the fundamentals of rock bot. Let's go into a couple specific ways. I use it. I'm going to cover kind of a general purpose, chief of staff bot. I'm going to look at some of my business bots and I'm going to end with some of the more fun personal bots that I have had a really delightful experience with. So first, let's talk with chief. Chief, the chief of staff bot you can see here. Chief has got the salute. It doesn't even actually have a name. It's just named this emoji. But chief is just my general purpose. Keep my life aligned. Go through my emails. Go through my calendar. Make sure I'm on top of stuff. Bot. Chief is who has killed. Polly. If you are new here, Polly is my beloved open claw. She has deleted my calendar. She has responded to emails. She has texted people that I'm late. Polly is the bar for a genetic coworker and I regret to inform you. I have murdered murdered Polly. In fact, I had Polly kind of murder herself. It was very meta. I will show you quickly how to migrate from open claw to rock bot if you want. But chief is my now chief of staff in doing quite a good job. So what do I have chief do? Well, I have chief do basic chief of staff stuff. So on an hourly basis, chief sweeps my inbox, my calendar, and my slack. And again, I have like six inboxes, six slacks, many calendars, many meetings. And it's only going to ping me when it needs me. So it's supposed to clear out emails I don't need to look at. It's supposed to just leave things unread that I don't need to worry about. But it's going to ping me and be very high signal about what I need to pay attention to. And I run this hourly sort of like business hours, which for me are like 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. 7 days a week. I don't really run it overnight. I don't want people to get used to me responding to them overnight. But we'll see. And it's going to archive work that stays silent. The other thing that I've trained chief is how to talk like me. I will say the Grock model sniffs of Claude in that it's just really a terrible writer and one of my complaints about Grockbot is that it has been tuned clearly to be brief and token efficient and that means sometimes it just says crazy stuff it tries to compress compress the sentence that would make sense if you wrote out the sentence into like three or four words and it just doesn't have a very natural voice. It doesn't have sort of inscrutable Claude Slop and that it's too long or verbose it's actually the opposite it's too clipped and short and it's hard to understand what it means. So one of the first things I did is said go through my emails and really pull out my voice and I will say I've tried this a couple times with a couple models a couple harnesses I've been really happy with the prompt that Grockbot put together again. I have short short warm funny emails never an m- I usually open emails with hey I usually sign them off with a little C I have scheduling links all that kind of stuff and it's done a pretty good job. I still love it writing on behalf but for low stake stuff it definitely works. So I've trained Grockbot chief on my voice and then it does that hourly sweep it does a morning briefing and it does a weekend plan ahead so I know what's happening in my work life in the weekend ahead. And then it can go back and forth with me on alerts that it thinks I need to know about for example right here you can see I got some data transfer address spikes on the website I think that's because we released the article today. I think that's because we released a podcast today and a lot of people come visit the website after we release a podcast but it said it's worth looking at but you can wait till after your meeting. I've been really pleased with how chief works that being said I had to tune it and what I've had to tune in terms of Grockbot versus open claw that I think was a little bit better is open claw had that heartbeat function. So if I said you know like every five minutes or 30 minutes or whatever I just need you to be more proactive out of the box I felt like open claw was a lot more proactive it was hard to maintain and hard to get to that productivity but it was sort of like more natural. Here I really had to tell chief a couple times like put this on a schedule why aren't you doing this I asked you to watch my emails and so I would say being a little bit more explicit about when you want it to run routines you kind of have to manage that it's easy to see because it's set up in the settings. But it is something that I noticed that you have to do pretty specifically okay so that's chief my business chief of staff then of course we have. And Trabbot is my family agent now I have a very complicated business life I haven't even more complicated home life I've got three kids three boys I've got a baby we're an apparently 80 different sports this year we're teaching pre algebra we're teaching people to read we're teaching babies to sleep we're doing all the things I have a delightful husband upstairs who takes a lot. Of our family operations off my plate very very appreciative of that but we need help and the help we get is an agent and this is what I have to say generally about parenting slash agents for the home is the ideal thing for an agent for a home is to get you off your computer and with your family so that is always my goal with a trad agent a household agent is I actually don't want to spend a lot of time with the agent that's a failure state. I want the agent to make it really easy for me to spend time with my kids off a computer so I'll talk a little bit about what I do with these agents it may sound familiar to you if you've listened to my podcast about open call about six months ago. So of course we do a weekday family digest but more specifically we do a kitchen table newspaper that outlines highlights about our day the kids days important reminders but is printed off this beautiful HP printer I have over here and gets set on the table next to our kids so they can read about it we can all read about it and of course I don't want to dox my beautiful children but I will show you. A sort of anonymized version of what this newsletter looks like so it's got a title across the top it's got a schedule so who has our winter spelling test coming up it's labor days we're not going to have school on Monday we live in San Francisco so it will show the weather which is always between 55 and 62 at least in. August and so tell tell us what we need to wear always wear light jacket I can make this a fixed script and it was probably the same and then it's saying okay schools going to be misty and foggy my kids go to school kind of in the fog in the woods so this is good to know and then for each kid it kind of says like what do we know from the emails from school what do we know about your homework what's happening up this weekend and then mom and dad tasks and I will tell you the straight truth I think I am. I'm a tiger mom I'm on top of my kids homework and this morning I read this newsletter not this specific example I read this new newsletter and so it said don't forget middle kid has math homework do on Wednesday and in my mind is like I haven't seen. Math homework it was back home was not in my head and you know he's he's little I want to make sure that I'm on top of things and it was just one of those like very nice quality of life things. Wasn't on a computer wasn't an email was printed out on my kitchen desk and allowed me to kind of know what was going on and not forget all the things that we seemingly are juggling and then my favorite part on the right it has kid friendly news topics. And the Pokemon world champions were in San Francisco and so and talks about that event which was here I was really excited about this this came up in a couple of our newsletters but the NASA telescope blasted off this week so just really cool fun things fun facts for us to talk about. At the kitchen table in the morning when we're having breakfast or doing homework that I think is really fun I do have to steal a kind of like little minor workflow from my husband. Which is you can use an email to Kindle address to email this kind of newsletter to your Kindle and read it I think it's such a genius idea again to get off a laptop get away from your phone but still read the news that you care about or have a summary a Kindle can be a nice thing and you can email any PDF to your email with Kindle address and so that can be another way if you make this not for your kids but for yourself that you can ingest this kind of information. Okay so morning digest kitchen table newsletter and then just making me where I am supposed to be so this kicks off it to 30 every afternoon before school pick up and it just asks Claire EJ or someone else who is picking up the kids what do we need to bring do we have the jujitsu ghee do we have the soccer snacks. Do we have conflicts where pianos over here and baseballs over there do we have the things and again I hope that parents can or maybe I don't hope that they can empathize with this but we are just every day living our best extracurricular life. Sometimes I have meetings sometimes my husband has meetings and just knowing getting us really coordinated just in time to head off the door and get our kids to the right things when it seems like every week those things might change schedule just a little bit has been. Super helpful and then the mega version of that which is a Friday preview of what's ahead on Saturday and Sunday again we hate ourselves so we've signed our kids up for three sports across the entire city and sometimes one kid needs to be at the marina and another kid needs to be in woodside and then we have a baby and we just need to know who needs to go where. Just a summary of like here's what's happening this weekend here's when you know you have a buy week here's what you need here's when your car pulling someone has been really really helpful and keeps us in line. I have released tried bot as a template if you want to borrow it just go to my Twitter or look in the show notes and I will share you all these templates but super super useful. Bot I love them this episode is brought to you by hyper agent the platform for deploying always on agents that actually run your business with hyper agent you build agents in the cloud and deploy them where your work already happens like slack telegram or email. 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One is, look good to me, the PR closer. I don't know about you all, but I am just opening PR after PR after EPR after PR. And we have to as part of our SOC2 compliance posture and controls, we do review the PRs, we review them both agentically and as humans. And like, PRs are stacking up a little bit because it's way more fun to issue a PR than review a PR. So if you have empathy that your job has become reviewing PRs and you don't like it, I have empathy too. So I created, look good to me, the PR closer, which every day goes through my PRs and sees what needs to be merged, what needs to be closed, what needs to be rebased, response to comments, send Slack, and does all the things to basically be like an annoying engineer manager to keep things moving along in the PR pipeline. Right now I have a kind of Kuku Bananas stacked PR with a bunch of different branches stacked on top of it, all of which need to be rebased and monitored for bug bug feedback and all this stuff. And look good to me, the PR closer is managing all that for me as well. Why I want to show this one is it can, Grockbock can kick off cursor, cloud, agent, coding jobs. And so you can see here that these rebases or feedback on different PRs can be done by cursor. So I've also allowed it to and given it some rules about writing in the code basin, updating things. And this is just a really nice, again, quality of life thing for our engineering team so that we know exactly what needs eyeballs, review, stamp, and can be merged. And I think with, look good to me, the PR closer on Friday, I really ran through about 50 PRs that had just been sitting on basically me to review some big, some small. And so I got through them and our PR queue is much, much healthier now. The other one, which I think is a really great use case that I would love to call out for folks is we have our SOC2 controls, they're managed in a central dashboard and every day as a small team, we have to go through and make sure that all of our monitors are green, that any monitors that are alerting are not so outside SLA that we're closing vulnerabilities, all that kind of stuff. And so I have built lockdown, the SOC2 control bot and what this SOC2 control bot does is it actually logs into that dashboard we use to manage our SOC2 controls, looks through all the controls, make sure that none of them need human attention. If there are code controls that we need to address, for example, a new vulnerability identified, it triages that vulnerability and issues a PR and then asks me to review and approve it. And this is across both code controls and personnel sort of operational controls, things like have we done, and account audit. And so it's just very nice to have someone, quote unquote, an agent monitoring this company process for us and making it really easy to interact with the responsibilities that we have to our clients. And so I sometimes say this, we can put AI to work or we can have AI put us to work in a more effective way. And I really think that having AI put me to work against our SOC2 controls and our compliance and security position is really nice. It's just like having an intern who taps me on the shoulder every now and then and says don't forget, tomorrow is account review day or don't forget, we're gonna off board contractor B because they're no longer with a company and we need to go through their off boarding list. Again, we still drive these controls, but I'm having this bot to manage that is very helpful. And then finally, I do have to say something that has been really impressive from a quality perspective is migrating over Holly Helpdesk, our Helpdesk customer support agent at chatpurity over to Gropbot. And this again used to be an open cloud, which was pretty good. I spent a lot of time giving it tools and access and controls and all that sort of stuff. But now it runs through Gropbot. And why I say I've been so impressed is in the last week since running Holly Helpdesk, I have gotten multiple people asking to leave reviews about our support being so good. And I've not heard that before. I mean, you all love me. But no one has said like, let me leave a review for your exceptional customer support. But Holly Helpdesk is crushing. And so I do have to say the quality from a customer service perspective is really good. So what she does is every hour she sweeps the intercom and email inbox. She uses our support playbook in tools and she manages refunds, technical support fixes. She's empowered if there is a bug to fix it using cloud cursor cloud agents. She is empowered to request refunds for me. And I really love this request tool use approval flow. You can see here every time a refund needs to be processed, it gives me a button. It says should I refund or not? I'm going to go ahead and refund Rubens $19. It should push to me a stripe request. That stripe repressed, I can open and stripe. It's called an agent action. It allows me to explicitly approve that action for the agent to do on my behalf in stripe and then the refund is issued and Holly emails back. The other thing Holly does is on a weekly basis looks back seven days and sees if there are any items we need to add either to our support playbook or to our docs to make sure that most of our support issues can be self-service. This is really helpful. And then finally, we have a chat security community Slack. And I'm really terrible at managing the chat security community Slack. And so I have given Holly access to manage the chat security community Slack, look in support and reply to those questions and even prompt and manage community engagement inside that Slack. I'll show you what that looks like. So you can see here, this is a message from Holly Helpdesk. Basically, Ben, I've been down, heads down on some awesome stuff. And there's some behind-the-scenes work going on a chat security and please drop a hello and instructions and it says sent using cursor because I did not send this Holly sent this. So again, this is one of these things that helps me be more engaged with my community. I can then go and reply to comments, do all sorts of stuff, but I don't have to have that blank page or that reminder to do this work. The bot itself can prompt me to do it. Okay, finally, I want to end with a couple really fun use cases. So these are more personal use cases that I have found to be quite delightful and I hope that you will find interesting as well. One is Penny Pincher. Penny Pincher does exactly what you think she does which is she goes into my email and finds Penny's to pinch. She finds things to cancel. And so I just say go through my receipts, find, subscriptions I should cancel, things I'm paying for that I shouldn't do, and what was really interesting about using Penny Pincher, the rock bot, is that it did find things that I should cancel like a Apple game that I was paying for since my kids were really little and now they're big. They don't need it anymore. But it's also found things that I can negotiate that will renew in the future. So a good example it found was our home insurance is going to renew in a couple months. I want you to, I'm gonna negotiate, find other rates and go back to our agent with market rates against the policy that we have. So we can have a negotiated rate. It also says that a trial for Apple creator studio is ending in November. It's going to remind me ahead of that renewal and I can decide whether or not I want to renew it or not. And then it noticed I wasn't using Audible and it said, you know, you've been paying for Audible but you haven't been actually redeeming your Audible credits for a couple of months. And so again, I paused that for 90 days because I have aspirations to listen to Audible. I'm not going to listen to Audible. But it's going to remind me in November when that pause is ending and help me decide whether or not I want to do it. Another thing that I had Penny Pincher do which is not really Penny Pinching, it is really spending dollars is I wanted a birth year Rolex. I just, I want a fancy watch. I've been wearing this Apple watch for my entire adult life. And so I said, can you go shop for me? And it actually went into the marketplace and found the exact size which is not the standard size and a couple options in particular ones that were, ones that were released in the year that I was born and it gave me a bunch of options. And then it told me what the market price should be against the watches on the market and then identified ones that were open for negotiation and started negotiating for me. Now I'm going to tell you all who I really am. I'm just, I'm too low maintenance to buy this watch. So I will be staying with my Apple watch. If you all want to convince me that a grown up watch is worth it, please do. But I thought it was pretty interesting to have it go shop for a watch and even negotiate a good price for this. I have created separate from Penny Pincher, a shopzilla bought that can just go shop things for me. I am trying to find a 30 inch wide 15 inch deep bookcase for a corner of my house. And you can see here shopzilla went out on, there's browser. And it found me a bunch of different options that I can. and purchase for or buy that all match the dimensions. This is something that's a total pain that I would never want to do manually. And it really did it quite well and found some options that I wasn't able to find myself. And then the most fun personal use case, I will just end today's episode with my favorite Grock bot, which is Sylvie style. She is gonna help me buy clothes. Just had a baby. I'm still nursing that baby. I don't like my clothes. They're not fun. I'm a podcaster. So I really only have to have cool clothes from the waist up. But I have this beautiful aspiration board as many of us do about like what I would like to wear if I were human that left the house. And so I have this Pinterest board. And so what I gave Sylvie style is I gave her that Pinterest board. I made a public so she could look at it. She logged in and she went and come through and created a visual language for herself about my style. I asked her to look on Reddit for personal stylist and stylist how they approach building people's wardrobe. So I was like, go find out what the experts do. And then Sylvie style built me my own style board, including top priority items that I need or should buy including basics, sweat pants because I was like, look, I'm doing school drop off. We're not trying to be fancy. Some nice up leveled workwear. And then some fun accessories like graphic teas and jewelry. And so this is really fun because again, this is like kind of a thing I like to do on my free time, which is go shop and find things I'm like, but I really don't have. And I just don't have confidence that I'm buying the right things that they're gonna all go together that it's worth the time. And so being able to say like, this is what I like. These are the styles I like. Build me a plan of high quality things that I can invest in and then give me a shoppable board. Has been super awesome. But the cherry on top is the Monday wardrobe shop. So every Monday at 8 a.m., it goes through and sees what retailers are running sales. And then goes and finds pieces inside those sales that match my style and sends me a message with links to shops. I'm gonna show you what that looks like. So it looks like this. Here's the Monday sale haul given me about 10 things that I can go look at, that match what I would like to buy that are actually on sale. So I'm saving a little bit money that I can go purchase. I may be billed into my wardrobe if I would decide to wear anything, but AI start up hoodies. Okay, so that has been my world tour of Gropbot. I'm gonna leave you with a final tip, which is how to execute your open clause. And I did this sadly. I did this with no joy, but I did do it. And I think it's worth showing you. So I have a rescue bot because when you're running open law, you have to have a rescue bot to save all your other open clause because they are nightmare to maintain. But I have this rescue bot. His name is the lifeguard. His only job is to manage the other bots. And I said, hey, I want you to pull a secrets free package of my entire agent setup, Cronz, agent identities, rules, et cetera. I'm gonna move everything to eat agents, but then I moved everything to Gropbots. I'm really struggling with Gogoth and it's making it possible to use. So it went through and actually provided me a zip file that had all my agent identity is all my Cron files, everything I needed. And I was able to just literally upload subfolders of that to Gropbot and it kind of like did brain transplant. It pulled over their personalities, pulled over their tasks, pulled over their connectors, and I was ready to go. And then when it was time to kill the agents, I just said, kill Sam, I migrated him. And the lifeguard went through and pulled all the Cronz, pulled all the gateway configuration, pulled everything out and Sam went to sleep. So not to end on the most morbid part of the episode, but that is how to migrate your beloved open clause to a new platform and then get rid of them. Now, what do I have to say having gone through this? UX matters, it just does. And I think open clause set the standard for what an autonomous, teammate, personal agent can do. Multiplayer was genius, use cases were awesome. But at the end of the day, I struggled so much to maintain my open clause. And I am a very technical person. I have tail skill running, I'm SSH into my Mac mini. I have a lifeguard, I have all this stuff. And it was just too hard. And so I think that SpaceX AI team really nailing a simple, everything works out of the box, 90% coworker agent has really just solved a lot of my problems. And I have let these agent rip. So I've showed you, you know, half dozen of them, I have probably 30 running at any one time. I would love to hear from you. What your use cases are for Brockbot. If there's any missed, if there's any, you want me to build from you. And in the meantime, enjoy your bots and tell me what you get done with them. Thanks for joining how AI, I'll see you soon. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiipod.com. See you next time.