I Gave Grokbot A Try... But I'm Done

I gave Grokbot a real try. It’s polished, easy to use, and you don’t need to know much about AI harnesses to stand up a “team.” That’s the whole pitch.

What I’m hitting is reliability. Desktop and phone don’t stay in sync. Messages go missing. The credential flow is slick, then it forgot API keys I had already given it — three times. And this morning a 6am Chief routine just didn’t run. No explanation. Just that it didn’t execute, and did I want to run it now.

If you’re putting business infrastructure on a cloud account you rent from xAI, it has to actually do the job. Last week’s outage took ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude down for hours. Hermes on the Mini kept going: cron on the machine, keys in a .env on disk, any model I plug in, including local.

Grokbot may get better. I’m not here to bash it. I’m dropping Super Grok Pro back to the cheaper plan and I’m not spending more time building on it. Hermes is nerdier and less polished. I’ll take that over infrastructure I don’t own.