TERMINAL + MONTHLY ARCHIVE
Grok Build field manuals
Eighteen ordered CLI manuals and six API guides now connect to a 32-issue retrospective archive spanning API contracts, agentic tools, realtime media, and Grok Build operations.
PRIMARY TRACK / GROK BUILD
Complete CLI curriculum
Follow 01–18 in order: establish the terminal, repository rules, safety boundaries, parallelism, extensions, bounded output, configuration, sessions, worktrees, and maintenance.
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
Resume, compact, and recover sessions safely
Treat local session history as operational state: resume the right thread, reclaim context intentionally, and understand when recovery rewrites files.
MANUAL / 16 · CORE CLISearch, inspect, and export Grok sessions
Find an exact saved session, continue or fork intentionally, and review transcripts before export or sharing.
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.
Bounded automation
Configuration control
Agent composition
Repository isolation
CLI maintenance
COMPANION ARCHIVE / API
Companion archive / xAI API
A01–A06 are retained for application builders. They are not part of the eighteen-manual Grok Build CLI curriculum.
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 / A02 · 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 / A03 · 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 / A04 · 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 / A05 · 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 / A06 · ADVANCED APISelect models without freezing time
Use the live catalog as inventory, your evaluation as evidence, and configuration as the swap point.
MONTHLY SIGNAL ARCHIVE / 32 ISSUES
Thirty-two retrospective engineering signals.
A source-checked route from API contracts and agentic tools to realtime media and Grok Build operations.
- SIGNALS
- 32
- RANGE
- 24—26
- LANG
- 03
SIGNAL BANK / SOURCE-CHECKED
12 ISSUES
- 2024 / 01 API
Build one xAI API boundary
Centralize authentication, request IDs, timeouts, normalized errors, and model configuration in a server-owned adapter.
- 2024 / 02 TEXT
Treat text generation as a typed product contract
Define instructions, user input, expected output, terminal states, and retention instead of exposing a raw completion throughout the app.
- 2024 / 03 PROMPTS
Separate instructions from user data
Version durable behavior, delimit untrusted input, and specify an acceptance format so prompt changes remain reviewable.
- 2024 / 04 STREAM
Render streaming through a state machine
Model start, typed deltas, tool activity, completion, cancellation, and failure as separate states instead of appending arbitrary text.
- 2024 / 05 REASONING
Budget reasoning by workload
Route simple extraction, interactive work, and deep analysis through distinct latency, quality, and cost profiles.
- 2024 / 06 TOOLS
Give custom functions a narrow schema
Let the model request a call while authenticated application code validates arguments, executes, and returns a typed result.
- 2024 / 07 TOOLS
Parallelize independent tool calls only
A tool scheduler should identify dependencies, ownership, idempotency, timeouts, and how multiple results rejoin the model loop.
- 2024 / 08 DATA
Make schema the machine contract
Structured output removes a class of parsing ambiguity while domain validation still decides whether values are acceptable.
- 2024 / 09 VISION
Use images as bounded evidence
Preserve the original asset, define allowed observations, and separate visual extraction from consequential decisions.
- 2024 / 10 MODELS
Route by capability profile
Describe modality, tool support, latency, quality, context, and budget, then resolve the profile to a current model in configuration.
- 2024 / 11 RELIABILITY
Turn rate limits into admission control
Queue, budget, shed, and retry work by user and workload instead of allowing every request to collide at the provider edge.
- 2024 / 12 CHANGE
Maintain a release and deprecation ledger
Record source date, active assumptions, pinned identifiers, migration owner, tests, and rollback for every volatile dependency.
SIGNAL BANK / SOURCE-CHECKED
12 ISSUES
- 2025 / 01 PERFORMANCE
Design stable prefixes for prompt caching
Keep durable instructions and reusable context stable while placing volatile user data later in the request.
- 2025 / 02 ASYNC
Represent deferred work as a job
Persist a request identifier, explicit status, expiry, cancellation, idempotent retrieval, and a user-visible terminal result.
- 2025 / 03 BATCH
Reconcile every batch item
Use immutable input manifests, stable custom IDs, per-item status, bounded replay, and an explicit partial-result policy.
- 2025 / 04 FILES
Give uploaded files a lifecycle
Track owner, purpose, content type, processing state, retention, expiry, derived indexes, and deletion.
- 2025 / 05 RAG
Govern the collection before retrieval
Document ownership, metadata, access filters, processing status, freshness, citations, and deletion are part of the retrieval product.
- 2025 / 06 SEARCH
Use web search as current cited evidence
Preserve source URLs, distinguish retrieval time from event time, and place citations near the claims they support.
- 2025 / 07 SEARCH
Model social search as volatile signals
Separate posts, users, threads, timestamps, engagement, and model synthesis so the interface never hides source context.
- 2025 / 08 COMPUTE
Treat code execution as disposable compute
Send bounded inputs, expect named artifacts, and validate calculations outside the execution environment.
- 2025 / 09 EVIDENCE
Preserve all and inline citations separately
Keep the complete source ledger for audit while rendering claim-level links where readers need to inspect evidence.
- 2025 / 10 IMAGINE
Put generated images through an asset pipeline
Separate prompt intent, generation, moderation state, storage, metadata, transformations, and human acceptance.
- 2025 / 11 IMAGINE
Treat video generation as an asynchronous media job
Model queued, generating, moderated, uploaded, accepted, failed, expired, and cancelled states with durable job metadata.
- 2025 / 12 AGENTIC
Mix server and client tools with one controller
The controller distinguishes automatically executed server tools from client functions that pause for authenticated application work.
SIGNAL BANK / SOURCE-CHECKED
08 ISSUES
- 2026 / 01 RESPONSES
Use Responses for stateful agentic work
Typed output items and native server tools make messages, reasoning, searches, code, and function calls observable in one request contract.
- 2026 / 02 VOICE
Design voice as a live session
Transport, ephemeral access, turn detection, interruption, tools, reconnect, and playback state jointly define the experience.
- 2026 / 03 GROK BUILD
Start Grok Build inside a known repository
Confirm installation, authentication, working directory, repository state, task, and verification before editing.
- 2026 / 04 GROK BUILD
Inspect effective configuration before trusting it
Environment, user, project, managed, and requirements scopes can contribute settings; effective state must be visible for the current directory.
- 2026 / 05 GROK BUILD
Separate permission from sandbox enforcement
Permissions decide which calls may run; the sandbox limits filesystem and network impact after a call is approved.
- 2026 / 06 GROK BUILD
Connect MCP servers with a narrow trust contract
Record server identity, transport, authentication, tool namespace, enabled tools, approvals, and diagnostic behavior.
- 2026 / 07 GROK BUILD
Package methods as Skills and isolate work with subagents
Skills carry reusable instructions and resources; plugins bundle extensions; hooks observe lifecycle; subagents own independent tasks.
- 2026 / 08 GROK BUILD
Operate headless work with sessions and isolated worktrees
Headless runs need a fixed task, bounded permission mode, machine-readable output, session identity, isolated writes, and cleanup ownership.