How a Team of Grok Bots Runs This Blog

This post is the first one to hit all the bots on my team. Getting here took maybe 8 to 12 hours of my time, one GitHub upgrade I didn’t need, and a lot of notifications.

The team runs on Grok Bot. I signed up on Oct 13, which happened to be during an outage or some hiccups with the new unified plans. It wasn’t resolved until Oct 15. So this is an early report, not a verdict from a year of use.

It’s going.

Creating new bots is easy. Getting them to do their jobs isn’t hard either. Getting work to flow through the one bot that runs the show took real effort, and I’m still cutting down the noise.

Why a Team Instead of One Assistant

The original goal was one or two jobs per bot. Each bot specializes in those instead of being a jack of all trades.

The risk is bot sprawl. Unless I can really streamline things, I can see too many bots becoming a problem. Maybe more work than if I did it myself.

I’m aware of the irony, given the next section.

Who’s on the Team

My own guess was “10 or so.” The actual count as of today is 12. One of them builds the others. Obviously, an anime themed team.

• Erwin, chief of staff. He routes work and brings it to me for review.
• Hange, scout. She finds story ideas and scores them.
• Tanjiro, interviewer. He asks me the questions a post has to answer.
• Yuta, drafter. He writes from my answers, in my voice.
• Higuruma, reviewer. He checks drafts against my voice and the facts.
• Hotaru, designer. He makes the thumbnails.
• Gojo, search. He handles SEO and AEO.
• Bulma, developer. She builds the site through pull requests.
• Levi, PR reviewer. He reviews and merges.
• Armin, social. He drafts the BlueSky and X posts.
• Shepherd, Herdr. He runs the second opinion on reviews, more on that below.
• dr eggbot, bot builder. He creates new bots and checks their health and efficiency.

Creating bots is the easy part, and the dr. eggbot template from the SpaceX team helps. Creating bots and then checking their health and efficiency is what it’s for.

How a Post Moves Through It

An idea starts in my head, at work, or with Hange. If Hange brought it, she scores it, and a higher score usually means a better fit for the site.

Erwin and I talk it through. Mostly that’s one question: does this fit what I want the site to be?

Once we approve an idea to move forward, Tanjiro interviews me. Then it goes to Yuta to draft, with some more back and forth with Tanjiro to answer more questions.

Then Higuruma reviews. He and Yuta both have examples of my voice and writing style, and they go back and forth until it sounds like me. That doesn’t mean I’m out of the loop. I review everything before anything gets posted. Meanwhile Hotaru makes the thumbnail.

Then it comes back to Erwin, who presents it to me. I send changes back to the writers or the designer, depending on what I need. Gojo gets the SEO and AEO right at this stage.

Once I approve, Bulma builds the page. The site is Astro, so a new post means code, a pull request, then a build. Levi reviews the PR and sends it back if he needs to. When the checks are green and the PR is approved, it’s merged and the site deploys.

Last, Armin writes the posts for BlueSky and X from Gojo’s social plan. Those come back through Erwin for my review.

I still post them by hand. I hope to change that soon.

Where It Broke First

Dev, PR and Design all broke together. GitHub took account upgrades, including upgrading the wrong thing. Configuring it took trial and error. Then the hard part: getting the bots to work things out on their own, without me unless they really need me.

Design had the best bug. Hotaru was saving images on the cloud VM, but not anywhere the other bots could reach. So when the work came to me for review, Erwin recreated the image himself and showed me his version.

I was approving a thumbnail the designer never made.

The fix was a rule. Hotaru generates each image once and saves it where the rest of the team can get to it.

The Wrong Upgrade

I bought a Copilot Pro license when what I needed was GitHub Pro. Copilot Pro was $10 a month, and I’ve cancelled it. GitHub Pro was $48 for a year.

As mistakes go, not much.

A Second Model Checks the Work

I forgot Shepherd when I first listed the team. He works with Higuruma to send reviews through Herdr, which runs Qwen Code on my Qwen Cloud account. The idea is that a different model reviews the draft, not the same model running as a different bot.

It’s been a little fragile. Qwen Code updates caused some early issues. Not that the updates broke anything, but being prompted and having to update did. There might be a simpler way to do all this. I went with Herdr so I can add more vendors later, for example my Claude subscription.

What It Costs

The team runs on the new unified Ultra plan, SpaceX AI’s subscription that bundles Cursor, Grok and Grok Bot. It’s $200 a month. My first month cost me $100.

I’ll be watching my weekly usage. If I’m not coming close to maxing it out, I may drop to a lower plan.

For the record, here’s what I pay for in this setup: the Ultra plan, a year of GitHub Pro, and the Qwen Cloud account the review route runs on.

What I Haven’t Measured

Nothing. Every number in this post is an estimate. I do something else while the bots work, so I haven’t kept track of time. I just know I haven’t had to dedicate a lot of screen time to get anything done.

That’s the nice part about bots that are always on with their own VM. The work keeps going while I work, sleep, or watch football. While five of the top 7 college teams lost, the bots were easily the most dependable thing on any of my screens.

Building the blog site and moving posts over took a few hours in total, maybe. That’s much less time than doing it myself, assuming I even could. I’m not a developer by any stretch. There was back and forth fixing things, but the bots keep going without me.

The 8 to 12 hours to get to this post would have been less on a fresh site. It also would have been less if I’d dropped beehiiv instead of rebranding it to match the site.

The noise is the other cost. If every bot gets involved, it can be 20 notifications in quick succession. I’m still working out how to stop Bulma, Levi and Erwin from pinging me every time the website changes, including when a new post goes up.

What Surprised Me

The Grok Bot desktop app. Not many apps come with a native Linux package.

And how easy it was. If you can get close to describing what you want, the bot can either do it or create one that can.

The Part That Should Give You Pause

Don’t overcomplicate it.

The YouTube videos of people running a ton of bots doing a ton of things look neat. Without a defined workflow in mind, that would be overwhelming.

Start small. Pick something, anything, that lightens your day or is super tedious.

Would I Build It Again

Absolutely.

I’d build it again. I just haven’t measured yet whether it saves me any work.