Cursor, since Grok 4.5, has had an incredible deal for frontier level models, their subscription now goes way further than OpenAI or Anthropic. Even on their lower tier plans you can use a lot tokens on their of their first party models (Grok and Composer) and not really run out comparatively. Combine them with an orchestrator and implementor type setup and it goes even further.

Grok is not the best model around, but it's decent. It gets the basic job done at a low price. I don't think it can advance frontier Math, yet.

I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding

Seems the cache read pricing almost doubled from $0.30 in Grok 4.5 to $0.50 in Grok 4.6.

In my experience in heavy coding sessions most pricing is just cache read and cache write like 80% of my token bill.

Interesting. Grok 4.5 is a capable model, although not quite at Fable/Sol levels. Will be interesting to see how this holds up. Musk appears to have made a savvy choice buying Cursor's data.

I often wonder if there's a chance, even if minimal... that they stole the weights of the Anthropic models they run on their datacenter... or are actively destillating it.

I have. He was using it due to philosophical reasons the same way many people have philosophical reasons for avoiding it. I don't know how many people are like that, but it's not exactly where you want to position your product if you're a business.

Personally - and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment based on comments I see on this site - I wouldn't touch Grok no matter how good or cheap it is. I don't trust Elon and I don't want to give another dollar to the world's richest person who turns around and uses the money to interfere with elections. The guy I know uses it for essentially the same reason I won't use it.

I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)

A bunch of SWEs at my work use it as their primary model.

We have Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor with essentially no cap on spend (top guy is spending over 10K a month on AI at API prices), and he hasn't had his hand slapped.

So it's not like they are using it purely because it's cheaper.

I think people like to use it for its speaking style, pretty solid performance, and its speed.

I use. I used to be a Claude user. Since trying Grok 4.5 and especially Grok 4.6, I don't want to go back to Claude any more (I have early access to 4.6).

Grok is 3x+ faster than Claude and I can't tell the diff in engineering work quality. As an engineer, speed is important to me.

once my codex/claude weekly limit was gone, i gave it a try. It was surprisingly good, not dumb in any way, and fast. I now require it as a part of 3-of-3 quorum with any codebase change.

I refuse to use that product because of the parent company.

it only very recently became competetive, if they proceed with improvements (and beating others on price) their share will grow

Does it matter? Why turn it into a popularity contest?

Folks working in US govt tend to, based on convos I've had with one such person.

Hi! Grok’s worked quite well for my use cases…

It’s also a great deal!

the new models are quite good, give it a shot

I'm only being forced to use it at $WORK since some people overran their Cursor bill, so everyone gets Cursor Auto enabled by default which routes to Grok 4.5.

I use it because it's cheap and good enough

> I have never met a single human being who uses Grok for coding

Me too. The only people I ever saw using grok were using it by accident as they used copilot in auto mode and noticed some prompts were thrown it's way.

I saw far more people using Mistral than grok.

Hello. Nice to meet you.

I've tried it on my "let's run every model in parallel and see which finds more edge cases" type of tasks, and Grok 4.5 was really behind Opus/ChatGPT but ahead of Gemini - despite having a strong showing on benchmarks.

That makes me really skeptical of it being GPT5.6-tier, much less Fable-tier, based on some of these benchmarks alone. But I'll test here shortly.