I tried Grok Bot when it first came out, and it was slow and buggy. It wasn’t charming early-beta weirdness, either. You’d give it a job and then wait, and wait, while it kept “working” like a contractor whose truck is always in your driveway and whose deck never gets built.
So I used Muse instead. Muse is made by Meta. Yes, that Meta.
I’d like to point out that I started self-hosting so big tech companies would have less say over my stuff. And the AI agent that impressed me most this fall came from the company that runs Facebook. Liking a Meta product felt like getting a genuinely great haircut at the DMV. Very confusing. I didn’t know who to thank.
Then I gave Grok Bot another shot, and holy shit. I’m blown away by how good it is now. Good enough that I’m paying thirty bucks a month for it and letting it near my email. I told Muse to take a seat.
Neither of these is a chatbot
You have to understand what these things are to see why “slow” was such a big fucking deal.
A chatbot answers questions. You type, it types back, done. An agent does the work itself. Grok Bot gives you named Bots, each with its own instructions and its own memory, all working on a cloud computer that’s yours. Where a service has a proper connector, the Bot uses it. Where it doesn’t, the Bot clicks through the website the way you would: open the page, read it, click the thing, read the next page. It keeps going after you close your laptop. It checks in with you on judgment calls, and you approve every purchase. You can show it a workflow once, save it as a skill and put it on a schedule. Bots can even message each other and split up bigger jobs, which is either the future of productivity or the setup for a very boring horror movie.
There are desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus phone apps. Being a Linux guy, I notice when Linux is actually on that list and not tacked on as “coming soon, probably, lol.”
Muse covers the same ground from Meta’s side. It launched on September 8, runs on Meta’s own Muse Spark models, and lives in a dedicated, secure virtual machine in Meta’s cloud. A separate agent called Sentinel runs alongside it and has to approve anything that goes out to the network, and Muse asks before sending messages for you or spending your money. It’s free for basic use, with paid tiers called Power ($20 a month) and Maximum ($100 a month).
Here’s why speed matters so much: an agent doing a real job isn’t making one request. It’s making dozens of them in a row. Look, think, click, look again. If every step is slow, the slowness doesn’t just add up, it stacks. A two-second delay is nothing in a chat. Spread across forty steps of a browser task, it’s the reason you gave up and did the shit yourself.
August, when it sucked
Grok Bot launched in beta on August 11, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed it was rough. One review from August 22 said “the rough edges are the ones you would expect from a weeks-old beta.” It also said connecting outside tools was “noticeably less mature,” with “failures that give you little to act on.”
That last line is the worst kind of bug. An error that tells you what broke is annoying. An error that tells you nothing is just the software shrugging at you. I’ve written whole blog posts about software that fails quietly and dares you to notice. I didn’t need an AI assistant joining that club.
So Grok Bot got benched, and Muse got the job.
Muse was good. Annoyingly good.
This isn’t a hit piece. Muse was very good, and I didn’t expect that at all. Meta did not show up to the agent fight with a half-assed product. It was the one I actually used, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because the ending of this story makes it look like the loser.
Muse didn’t get worse. Grok Bot just got a hell of a lot better.
What changed in two months
On October 16, SpaceXAI (the company formerly known as xAI, renamed back in July) shipped a big Grok Bot update. According to SpaceXAI, computer tasks now finish about three times sooner on average, and replies to everything else come back in less than half the time. That’s their number, not mine, and I’m the guy who wrote a whole post about trusting numbers only after reproducing them. But a 3x speedup on exactly the thing I hated in August lines up very nicely with going from “this is slow as shit” to “oh, damn.”
The same update made voice calls faster, more reliable and better at remembering earlier conversations. It cleaned up the chat cards and added new fonts and themes. If you know me, you know I noticed the themes. Notifications now go only to the device you’re actually using, instead of every screen you own going off at once like a smoke alarm. Bots can read your X Chat messages if you connect your X account. There are new connectors too: Robinhood, Coinbase, Trello, PostHog, beehiiv and eToro.
Two months, from “nearly unusable for me” to “Muse, take a seat.” That’s a fucking turnaround.
What I’ve actually got it doing
Here’s the honest list, so far.
Seven email accounts. Yes, seven. I’m not proud of it. Every one of them made sense when I made it, which is exactly how you end up with seven. Grok Bot manages all of them now, so one thing keeps track of the whole pile instead of me playing whack-a-mole with seven tabs and losing.
My rides to and from work. It books them up to a week in advance, and it keeps checking for time changes. That second part is the one I actually care about. Booking a ride is easy. Noticing that the ride you booked on Monday quietly moved by Thursday is the part that makes you late, and it’s exactly the kind of boring, repetitive checking a human forgets to do and a computer never gets bored of.
My mornings. Every morning it gathers my news and the trends on X into one place, so I’m not doom-scrolling four apps before coffee to find out what the internet is mad about today.
None of these jobs is glamorous. That’s the point. These are the chores that eat twenty minutes here and ten minutes there, and they’re precisely the click-around, check-again kind of work that was unbearable when every step took forever. Back in August, a Bot babysitting my ride times would have been slower than me just opening the app. Now it isn’t, so it gets the job.
I said “so far” on purpose. It’s early. I’ll report back when it either keeps this up or books me a ride to the wrong side of town.
Xpass exists. I’m paying for it.
A while back I wrote a post about a leaked X, Grok and Cursor bundle called Xpass, with “If It Exists” right there in the title. Well, it exists. It launched on October 12, and I’m on it.
To be precise, the official name isn’t Xpass. It’s “The X Subscription,” which sounds like something that shows up in a plain brown envelope. The leak’s name was catchier, and I’m going to keep calling it Xpass, because I’m petty like that. The early leaks also got some tier prices wrong, so if you read about this before launch, throw that out.
The real lineup is Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200 a month. I’m on the $30 Premium tier, which is where Grok Bot shows up (Plus doesn’t get it). SpaceXAI pitches Premium as the benefits of SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+, which it says used to cost $90 a month combined. Paid plans draw from one usage pool shared across the Grok apps, Grok on X and Cursor, and anything past that gets billed separately at API list prices. That last part is the asterisk to keep an eye on.
Getting there is still a goddamn maze, though. Cursor’s Grok Bot help pages list The X Subscription right next to the older routes: linking a SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy or X Premium+ account to a legacy Cursor account, a Grok Business seat, or a Cursor plan that includes Grok Bot. Existing subscribers can stay on their old plans, too. So there are at least four doors into the same room, and the signs on them were clearly written by different people who never met. I picked the one with the price tag I could read.
The chair
So that’s where things stand. Grok Bot, the one I wrote off in August, is now running my inboxes and my rides to work, on a subscription I wrote a whole post doubting existed. Muse, the Meta product I was weirded out to like, is on the bench.
A first impression of an AI agent has about the shelf life of milk. Grok Bot was in that same chair two months ago. Muse, take a seat, and don’t get too comfortable. The way this shit moves, you’ll probably be back by Christmas.