Hi Reader,

As always I appreciate you being here! Here's what you'll find in today's email:

• Is Grok Bot Worth Your Time?
• Fable 5.1 & GPT-6 Astra Landed
• New & Trending Content

You read. I listen. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Is Grok Bot Worth Your Time?

Search 'Grok Bot' on Twitter or YouTube and like clockwork you'll be bombarded with hype grifters.

I recorded a podcast this week with Aaron Makelky, who is a practitioner and someone I really respect in the AI space. He has been inside Grok Bot since launch and paid full price for it.
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​See the Full Breakdown on Grok Bot​

I haven't tested it myself. My son was born and I was in the NICU while everyone else posted about it.

So I asked Aaron the only question that matters: who is Grok Bot actually for and is it worth it?

The Grok Bot Tier Test

Aaron sorts these tools into three tiers, and your tier decides your tool:

• The tinkerers. That's OpenClaw. Aaron's take: "no one wants to have a full-time job of fixing the system."
• The terminal crowd who want to pick their own model. That's Hermes.
• Everyone else. That's Grok Bot: no API keys, runs in the cloud, keeps working with your laptop closed.

The honest catch: Aaron is on the highest plan and still hits rate limits most weeks, and you can't pick your model or even see which one you're getting.

So my answer: worth a look if you want something that just runs without babysitting. Skip it if you need model control or heavy daily use.

The best thing Aaron said had nothing to do with Grok Bot. He runs a whole team of bots in there, but the files that tell them how to work sit in a folder he owns.

So the day he cancels, he drops those files into Claude Code and it already knows how he edits a podcast.

Models come and go, your systems shouldn't.

Steal the three questions I run before trusting any tool with real work:

1. Where do my instructions live? If your prompts and briefs only exist inside one tool's interface, you're renting them. Mine are plain text files in a folder I back up.
2. Could I paste this into another tool tomorrow? Plain text moves into almost anything. A workflow you built by clicking doesn't, so you rebuild it from scratch.
3. Where does the finished work land? Aaron won't let his bots send anything for him, only draft it. Those drafts sit in his own Gmail, still there after he cancels.

The worst thing you can do is build inside someone else's ecosystem with no control.

Fable 5.1 & GPT-6 Astra Landed

Both dropped this week, and Fable vs Astra is already the next tribal war.

I've been running Fable 5.1 for my high value work and I like it a lot. Anthropic also priced it around 25% cheaper than Fable 5 for typical workloads, which is the part nobody posts about.

Astra is still rolling out to a limited set of organizations, so I'll test it the day my access shows up.

What got my attention: OpenAI's launch page benchmarks Astra against Fable 5.1 by name, 64.6% to 52.6% on agentic research.

When both labs cite each other on launch day, the gap is closer than either camp wants you to believe.

Pick the model that matches the job, not the team you joined. Much easier when your system moves with you.

Have you tried using Grok Bot? What do you think about Fable and Astra? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

Until Next Time 🫡
Ryan

P.S. I just launched a service called AI Concierge. Every day someone asks to pick my brain, so this is how I become your 'AI guy' and guarantees you my time. Monthly calls, full access to all my AI resources, and much more for $999/month. Spots are limited.

New & Trending Content

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