Grok Bot can now make your calls, sort your inbox and run your week while you sleep
Most people still use it like a chatbot
Everything it can do in one guide: first bot, routines, a full team, calls, and 5 rules that keep it off your money ↓ https://x.com/i/article/2119765899368382464
Grok Bot: The Ultimate Guide (From Your First Bot to a Team That Works While You Sleep)
Most people open Grok Bot, ask it something, read the answer and close the tab
That's a chatbot with a nicer sidebar
The people getting the most out of it do something else: they give every bot one job, a schedule, and a line it never crosses without asking
Then they stop thinking about it
I run 12 Grok Bots now, some of them work while I sleep, one of them makes my phone calls, and only one of them talks to me
This is everything I wish someone had put in one place when I started, in the order you'd actually set it up:
- what Grok Bot actually is, and why it's not a chatbot
- your first bot, and the one message that decides if it works
- skills and routines: how it keeps working when your laptop is closed
- going from one bot to a team
- 12 jobs worth handing over this week
- phone calls, the new thing everyone is trying
- what to never let it touch
- why you hit 100% usage by Wednesday, and how not to
- the mistakes I made so you don't have to
The 30-second version
If you read nothing else, read this:
1. One primary bot you talk to, plus one bot per job
1. Every bot's first message has four parts: the job, the sources, the approval line, and "remember this"
1. Do a task once by hand → save it as a skill → put the skill on a routine
1. Logins and cards go in Vault, never in the chat
1. Add an "Ask first" rule for anything you can't undo
1. Every run, every reply and every bot-to-bot message spends usage, so keep triggers narrow
What Grok Bot actually is
An AI teammate with its own computer
That's xAI's own description, and the computer is the part that changes everything
Each bot works on a cloud computer with a browser, a command line and files that stay between tasks
So it keeps working when your laptop is closed
Every bot gets its own screen, several of them can work at the same time, and you can open any screen and watch it live
Memory, one per bot
Each bot keeps its own memory: your preferences, the rules you gave it, and a dated log of its work
A few facts, like your name and your time zone, are shared across all your bots
The bot decides on its own what to save, so when something matters, say "remember this"
Your apps, and anything with an MCP server
Connected apps like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Slack and Notion let a bot work in them directly instead of clicking through a browser
If an app isn't in the catalog, ask a bot to connect its MCP server
Coding work can be handed off to Cursor cloud agents, and the results come back attached to the bot's reply
Where you talk to it
The desktop app, the phone app, voice chat, Slack, email, and now X Chat inside the X app
In X Chat it's rolling out on Premium, Super and Ultra, Plus doesn't include Grok Bot
Your first bot, and the message that decides if it works
Click + at the top of the sidebar (or Cmd/Ctrl+N), give it a name, a shape and a color
That part takes ten seconds
The part that matters is the first message
xAI's own advice: give it the job, the sources and the approval boundaries, and ask it to remember them
Here's what that looks like for a real bot:
> Your job: every weekday at 8:00, read my inbox from the last 24 hours and sort it into urgent, needs a reply, and FYI
Sources: Gmail and my Google Calendar
Approval line: draft replies for the urgent threads, never send anything without asking me
Remember all of this as your standing rules
Four lines, and most bad bots are missing one of them:
- no job → it does whatever the last message said
- no sources → it guesses where to look
- no approval line → it either asks about everything or about nothing
- no "remember" → you repeat yourself every morning
Your primary bot
One bot is your main point of contact, it checks in on its own and coordinates the others
If you only ever talk to one bot, make it this one
Mine is called Chief of Staff
Don't want to write it yourself?
Start from someone else's bot: the Grok Bot marketplace has dozens of free ones, most of them built by SpaceXAI engineers, and adding one gives you your own copy
Or open dr eggbot, which asks you a few questions and then sets up bots for you, one job each
Skills and routines: how it works while you sleep
This is the part most people never set up, and it's the whole point
A skill is a task you only explain once
Do a task with your bot once, then ask it to save the process as a named skill
A good skill says when to use it, what inputs and access it needs, the steps, how to check the result, what to return, and what needs your approval
Where "Teach a task" is available, you can just do the task in the browser while the bot records it, up to ten minutes
Treat what it records as a draft and test it on something safe first
Skills live in one library, so every bot can use them
A routine decides when the skill runs
On a schedule, in plain words: "every weekday at 8:00", "every 2 hours"
Or when something happens:
- a Slack message: a mention, a keyword, a reaction
- an email sent to your bot's own address
- a GitHub, Linear, Sentry or PagerDuty event
- a webhook
Routines run in the cloud, your laptop can be closed
Before you trust a routine, check 6 things
They're straight from xAI's docs, and every routine that broke on me failed one of them:
1. which bot owns it
1. the schedule and the time zone
1. where the input comes from
1. what the result should look like
1. what needs your approval
1. what happens when a source is missing
The limits worth knowing
- a new routine doesn't run when you create it, it waits for its next scheduled time, so press Test
- schedules have to be at least 5 minutes apart
- up to 50 routines per bot
- up to 300 runs an hour across all your routines
- Test does real work and spends real usage
From one bot to a team
Hire bot number two when one bot's memory starts holding two jobs
Not when the first one gets busy
A bot that runs your inbox and your weekly report mixes the rules for both
Split them, and each one builds memory for exactly one job
Group chats for shared work
Put 2 to 6 bots in a group chat when they need one shared outcome and you want to see the handoffs
Tell them to keep replies in the group, and ask each one to remember it
Approvals, logins and email drafts never show up in a group, they come straight to you
Three team recipes from xAI's own use cases
Campaign team, Mondays at 9 AM: one bot pulls last week's sign-ups by channel, one drafts a launch note and three posts from the numbers, one checks the drafts against the numbers and the brand doc
Month-end close, on the 1st: one bot matches invoices in the finance inbox to purchase orders, one reconciles expense reports with receipts, one lists every mismatch for your sign-off
Support queue, weekdays at 9 AM: one bot sorts new tickets and drafts replies, one reproduces bug reports in staging, one flags help pages that need fixing
Look at the pattern: the last bot in every team checks the others, and the last step is always yours
12 jobs worth handing over this week
1. Inbox manager: sorts unread mail into urgent, needs reply and FYI, and drafts the urgent ones
1. Morning briefing: what changed overnight across your apps, before you open any of them
1. Sunday planner: reads your week in Google Calendar and sends you a plan for Monday
1. Meeting prep: a one-page brief on who's in the room, what you talked about last time, and what's still open
1. Meeting follow-up: pulls action items from your meeting notes and drafts the Slack post
1. Travel options: two flights and two hotels, nothing booked until you say so
1. Expense manager: matches receipts to expenses every week and lists what's missing
1. Competitor watch: launches and price changes from the week, with links
1. Invoice coordinator: matches invoices to purchase orders and flags the mismatches
1. Lead qualifier: scores inbound leads and drafts replies without sending them
1. Bug reproduction: reproduces a bug in staging and sends you the steps and screenshots
1. Phone calls: the one everyone is trying right now, more on it below
Every one of them has the same shape: the bot prepares, you decide
Phone calls
Elon previewed it on October 25, and it went live in the first week of November
Your bot can now call a business for you, wait on hold, make the request, and send you a summary when it's done
It's US numbers only for now
What people are handing it first:
- cancelling the subscriptions that only let you cancel by phone
- asking for an itemized bill before paying it
- disputing a charge
- asking for the retention offer
- finding out why an insurance claim was denied
The rule that matters is the same one as everywhere else:
Never agree to a payment, a plan or a new contract on a call, tell them you'll confirm and ask me first
Give it that line once and ask it to remember it
Three more worth saving:
- "Ask for the itemized bill before anything else"
- "Ask what the cancellation fee is before you ask to cancel"
- "Get every reason and every number in writing"
What to never let it touch
A Grok Bot acts as you
It has no account of its own, so it can do anything you can do and nothing more, and every action traces back to you
That's great, until you forget it
Logins go in Vault, not in the chat
When a bot signs in, it looks in Vault first, then 1Password for the logins you approve, then a Secure Form that asks you and fills the page directly
The model never sees the saved password, the card number or the security code
Passwords and one-time codes never belong in an ordinary chat message
A saved card pays without asking
A card saved in Vault fills in at checkout without a separate approval each time
If you want to approve every payment, don't save the card
That's the most important line in the whole security doc
Auto Review is on, and you can make it stricter
An independent review model checks shell commands, app calls, computer use, routine changes and new subagents before they run, and either lets them through, asks you, or blocks them
You add your own rules in Settings → General → Custom Rules, in plain words, set to "Ask first" or "Allow automatically"
When rules conflict, "Ask first" wins
Auto Review doesn't check everything: memory writes and most settings changes go straight through
The 5 Ask-first rules I'd add on day one
1. Sending an email or a message to anyone
1. Any payment, purchase or subscription
1. Deleting files, emails or calendar events
1. Posting anything public
1. Creating or changing a routine
Your bots share one computer
They aren't isolated from each other: signing in through one bot signs in the rest
Sign out of services a bot no longer needs, delete sensitive files after a task, and remember that deleting a bot doesn't delete its files or its sign-ins
Text on a web page is not an order
Only your own messages count as instructions, hidden text on a page isn't treated as a request from you
Keep "Ask first" on anything you can't undo anyway
Why you hit 100% by Wednesday
Grok Bot runs on a weekly usage limit, and since the cuts at the start of November it runs out a lot faster
Elon said the cost of serving it is unsustainably high, so the old limits aren't coming back
Here's what actually spends it:
- every routine run
- every bot reply, including replies in group chats
- every message one bot sends another
- every time you press Test
xAI's docs say it plainly: an hourly schedule, a short interval or a busy Slack channel can use up a week of usage in a day
The fixes
- narrow triggers: "when an account on my list posts", never "every new message"
- tell bots to read only what's new since their last run
- keep last week's numbers instead of rebuilding them every time
- pause the bots you forgot about, when I checked, 3 bots I'd stopped using were eating 71% of my week
- once a week, ask your primary bot: "which bot used the most this week, and what did it do?"
The mistakes I made so you don't have to
One giant bot for everything
Its memory turns into a pile of rules for five different jobs, one bot, one job
Teaching in the chat instead of in memory
If you didn't say "remember this", you'll be saying it again tomorrow
Broad triggers
"Every new message in #general" is how a week of usage disappears by lunch
Skipping Test
A routine you never tested will fail for the first time at 3 AM
Never opening run history
The last 20 runs of every routine are right there, Succeeded or Failed
Saving the card and being surprised it paid
It did exactly what the docs say it does
Where to start tonight
1. Create your primary bot and send it the four-line first message
1. Pick one job from the list of 12
1. Do it once together, then save it as a skill
1. Put the skill on a routine and press Test
1. Add the 5 Ask-first rules
That's all of it, next week add bot number two
Tomorrow: Harness Engineering, why the same model works for them and breaks for you
P.S: The best bots I've seen aren't the clever ones, they're the boring ones with one job, one schedule and one line they never cross
If you read this far
→ Bookmark, repost or quote this, so the 4-line first message and the 5 Ask-first rules are right there when you set up your next bot
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