A 7-dimension adversarial review (find -> independently refute) surfaced 14 real
issues; fixed each:
Runtime bugs
- GrokCliSession.send drained stdout fully BEFORE stderr — a >64KB stderr burst
would deadlock the turn forever (spinner never clears). Drain stderr
concurrently, and add a per-turn watchdog (ROBOCO_GROK_TURN_TIMEOUT_SECONDS,
default 600s) that kills a wedged process and emits error+turn_end.
- Crash-restarted grok agents launched `grok -p ""` (empty prompt) — Claude gets
a scan-for-work fallback. Default the prompt in _spawn_container so every
dedicated provider gets it too.
- _grok_usage_json read /data/grok-usage unconditionally while its writers branch
compose-vs-local, so a local-mode agent finalized at $0 and the cost-cap was
inert. Single-source the path in a new _grok_usage_dir helper (read == write).
- GrokCliSession secretary role fell through to "unknown" (get_agent_role returns
a truthy sentinel, never None), defeating the ROBOCO_AGENT_ROLE fallback.
Parity / hardening
- --deny set was missing `git tag -d` / `git reflog delete` that the Claude
bash-guard blocks — added them (the "same set" claim is now true).
- Interactive mains now install the bash-guard hook too (defense-in-depth).
- Compose: collapse the GROK_AUTH_DIR / ROBOCO_HOST_GROK_DIR auth-mount pair into
one canonical var so a partial override can't silently break agent auth.
Docs / comments
- Panel routing card + architecture security doc no longer say Grok runs on the
deleted opencode runtime; orchestrator comments point at the renamed entrypoint.
Tests
- Cover the interactive _render_grok_config MCP wiring (ModuleNotFound guard +
secretary HMAC env), the cost-cap kill-failure + interactive relay-close paths,
the local-mode usage read, the role fallback, the turn timeout, and the new
git denies. (#13 — a separate grok "Write" tool — investigated: grok's only
built-in file-mutation tool is search_replace, already removed; no gap.)
Gate green: ruff, mypy, xenon, tests.
Bring the grok CLI to parity with the Claude path on the four deliberate
differences:
- Reasoning: drop the per-role `--effort low` default — Claude sets no per-role
thinking budget, so grok now uses the model default for every role. The
fleet-wide ROBOCO_GROK_REASONING_EFFORT override stays as a cost lever. (This
also un-caps intake-draft quality, the one that actually mattered.)
- Subagents: the intake interviewer may now fan out to subagents (parity with the
Claude intake's `Task` allowance); every other role still has `Agent` removed.
- Web: `--disable-web-search` for every role — no agent gets direct web (Claude's
tool set has none either); the roles that get web reach it through the gated
roboco-search MCP, unaffected.
- Bash command filtering: full parity, split by deny semantics. Verified live that
a grok PreToolUse hook deny CANCELS the run, while native `--deny` denies
GRACEFULLY (the agent gets a permission error and recovers). So:
* git network/branch/history ops -> native `--deny` (operational reflex; the
agent must recover, not drop the task). Expanded to the full bash-guard set.
* credential-exfil / identity-forgery / internal-API / env-dump patterns ->
the SAME bash-guard the Claude path runs, wired as a grok PreToolUse hook
(ROBOCO_GUARD_SKIP_GIT=1 so it leaves git to `--deny`). A hard cancel is the
right response there — no legitimate agent reads ~/.netrc or forges an
X-Agent-ID. One tolerance line (accept grok's camelCase `toolInput`) makes
the one tested script guard both runtimes; +5 grok cases (50/50 green).
Also cleaned stale internal task-number / smoke labels out of bash-guard-hook.sh.
The blueprint was mounted at /app/system-prompt.md but never reached grok — a real
parity gap vs the Claude path (which passes --system-prompt-file). grok agents ran
only on the per-task prompt, missing their RoboCo role/org context.
Verified live on grok 0.2.56 that the obvious flags do NOT work headless:
`--system-prompt-override` and `--rules` are silently ignored under `grok -p`
(identical output with and without). What IS honoured is grok's instruction-file
discovery — and `$HOME/.grok/AGENTS.md` is loaded GLOBALLY regardless of --cwd
(a project AGENTS.md only loads from the cwd/project root, which would pollute the
agent's git workspace). Proven end to end: a blueprint written there makes grok
adopt the role ("I am the RoboCo intake interviewer ... -- intake-1").
write_agents_md() copies /app/system-prompt.md -> ~/.grok/AGENTS.md; the one-shot
render (grok_cli_config.main) and both interactive mains call it. No git pollution
(it lives in ~/.grok, not the workspace), and it covers repo-cwd and /app-cwd
roles alike. Reverted the non-working --system-prompt-override wiring.
Move the last Grok runtime off opencode onto xAI's official `grok` CLI, for full
parity with the Claude path. The intake/secretary chat now runs per-turn headless
`grok -p` invocations that resume one session id (proven live: context carries
across runs), with streaming-json deltas mapped to the existing panel StreamChunk
kinds — the IntakeDriver loop, message source, relay, and idle reaper are reused
unchanged; only the SessionFactory differs (GrokCliSession replaces the
opencode-serve session).
- GrokCliSession + a pure, unit-tested streaming-json -> StreamChunk assembler
(thought coalesced to one block, text streamed live, end captures the session
id for -r, fenced-draft fallback, clear errors incl. rate-limit).
- intake propose_draft and secretary read_company_state/read_task/submit_directive
are now FastMCP servers (roboco-intake / roboco-secretary) wired into
~/.grok/config.toml, launched via `uv run --directory /app` to resolve the
installed package. The secretary tools reuse the shared backend helpers.
- Orchestrator: interactive spawn mounts the subscription auth + per-agent usage
dir (no metered xAI key, no permission env — grok flags carry per-role perms);
usage/cost now read a captured usage.json (drop the opencode.db reader, the
_opencode_db_path/_grok_usage_from_opencode methods, and the cost-cap's
opencode read). hosts["opencode"] -> hosts["grok_usage"]; OPENCODE_DATA_DIR ->
GROK_USAGE_DATA_DIR.
- Fix one-shot usage capture: `-s` does not pin the session id (grok generates
its own), so the entrypoint now reads the real id back from the JSON run log
and the reader uses it; usage is captured per-turn on the interactive path.
- Delete the opencode layer: opencode_config/opencode_usage/opencode_session, the
docker/grok/*.js plugins, the old one-shot entrypoint, and their tests.
- Compose (all three files), .env.example, and stale comments updated to the
grok-CLI runtime; add the SuperGrok auth mount + grok-usage dir.
Gate green: ruff, mypy (296 files), xenon, tests. NAS build/verify pending.
Grok runs on the SuperGrok subscription, but — exactly like Claude on Max — we
still record per-agent tokens and a notional cost for the dashboard. The grok
CLI writes a cumulative totalTokens per turn into
~/.grok/sessions/<cwd>/<session-id>/updates.jsonl (the grok analogue of the
Claude transcript / old opencode.db); the max is the session total. This reader
locates that file (url-encoded cwd), extracts the total, and prices it at the
output rate (no input/output split from the CLI; conservative + matches the
reasoning-at-output convention). Validated against a real grok-build session
(18253 tokens -> $0.0365). Entrypoint + finalize wiring follows.
First piece of the Grok CLI provider that replaces the opencode runtime: a
pure, unit-tested module the agent entrypoint runs to translate the mounted
mcp-config.json into ~/.grok/config.toml ([mcp_servers]) and compute the
per-role 'grok -p' flags — subagent/shell/edit tool removal, raw-git-mutation
and rm-rf denies, reasoning effort — mirroring ClaudeCodeProvider's per-role
permissions with native grok flags instead of an opencode permission block +
JS guard plugins. Uses tomli_w. The rendered config + env injection are
validated live against grok-build (the model called the server through it).
Renn F