Grok bots push shift to everyday commercial agents

Personally, I think the shift to the next stage—commercial agents—was kicked off by Grok bots.

Setting up and maintaining separate computing infrastructure on your own might be fun and interesting for some people, but for most it’s a hassle and hard to stay motivated.

But seeing how, even if you just define the agent’s personality and role in broad strokes, it can handle a decent range of tasks—even if it’s not as polished as Hermes—makes me think that as this gets simpler and more accessible, life will get a bit easier for everyone.

If you’ve got access—say you accidentally paid for Twitter Premium Plus or a year of Cursor and still have time left (they refused to refund me no matter what), or you got carried away imagining Grok and ended up stuck with a yearly plan—but haven’t tried making an agent yet, give it a shot. It really does make everyday life a lot easier.

Start simple with alerts for the latest updates in your interests, then have fun spinning up Elon’s virtual compute and a well-tuned model to see what it can do.

In particular, folks who trade crypto or stocks are always busy, so it’s great for things like automatically following up on unfinished shows or anime you paused, getting the fastest possible updates on typhoons or natural disasters if you’ve booked a trip, and other everyday follow-ups you think about but can’t be bothered to track. And the icons are cute, too.