TERMINAL COURSE / 01—18
Grok Build field manuals
Twelve ordered CLI manuals take you from a clean install to controlled automation. Six API manuals remain as a separate advanced track.
PRIMARY TRACK / GROK BUILD
Core CLI course
Follow 01–12 in order: establish the terminal, repository rules, safety boundaries, parallelism, extensions, and automation.
Foundations
Install and verify Grok Build
Install the official grok executable, prove which binary your shell resolves, and establish a repeatable update check before opening a repository.
MANUAL / 02 · CORE CLIAuthenticate without spreading credentials
Choose interactive, device-code, or API-key authentication for the environment you are actually running, then verify and revoke it cleanly.
MANUAL / 03 · CORE CLIRun a disciplined first repository session
Open Grok at the repository boundary, inspect what it discovered, and turn a vague first prompt into evidence, acceptance criteria, and verified changes.
Repository context
Controlled execution
Plan, review, and approve before editing
Use Plan Mode for ambiguous or high-impact work, annotate the proposed path, and keep approval as a meaningful engineering gate.
MANUAL / 06 · CORE CLILayer permissions and sandboxing
Control whether a tool call may run, then separately constrain what an approved process can read, write, and reach.
Session operations
Parallel engineering
Extensions
Extend Grok with skills, plugins, and hooks
Package reusable knowledge, install extension bundles from reviewed sources, and place deterministic policy around agent lifecycle events.
MANUAL / 10 · CORE CLIConnect MCP servers with explicit trust
Add local stdio or remote HTTP tools, keep secrets outside committed configuration, and diagnose the effective server set before use.
Automation
Automate Grok in headless CI and ACP clients
Select stable machine output, preserve session identity, bound tool authority, and use ACP when another application owns the interaction.
MANUAL / 12 · CORE CLIOperate large tasks with Grok Workflows
Describe a genuinely parallel job in natural language, monitor its phases, and save a successful workflow as a reusable team command.
SECONDARY TRACK / API
Advanced / xAI API
Use 13–18 when you are building your own application against the xAI API rather than operating the Grok Build CLI.
Establish your first API signal
Move from an empty project to a controlled first request without leaking a key or hard-coding a short-lived model name.
MANUAL / 14 · ADVANCED APIDesign a durable text-generation loop
Treat a response as a lifecycle with state, streaming, storage policy, and recovery—not as one magical string.
MANUAL / 15 · ADVANCED APIBuild a bounded tool system
Understand which tools execute on xAI infrastructure, which return control to your code, and where safety gates belong.
MANUAL / 16 · ADVANCED APIClose the function-calling loop safely
Define precise schemas, dispatch with policy, return results, and continue until the model can answer—or your budget ends.
MANUAL / 17 · ADVANCED APITurn model output into a typed boundary
Use supported JSON Schema deliberately, validate again at runtime, and design for semantic—not merely syntactic—correctness.
MANUAL / 18 · ADVANCED APISelect models without freezing time
Use the live catalog as inventory, your evaluation as evidence, and configuration as the swap point.