Christopher Dean

Grok Bot doesn't need to wait for you to give it instructions anymore. Your iPhone can tell it when to get to work. I tested this today. My wife sent me a simple iMessage containing a keyword. That message automatically triggered my Grok Bot routine and passed the actual message text to it. No opening apps. No typing prompts. No manual intervention. Here's how to connect iPhone activity to Grok Bot so real-world events can start your AI workflows automatically. THE SETUP (iMessage example) 1. In Grok Bot, create a new webhook-triggered routine. Give it a specific job and clear permissions. 2. Copy the routine’s webhook URL and authorization header from the side panel. Ask Grok Bot for the required request body. 3. On your iPhone, open Shortcuts → Automation → + → Message. 4. Choose a sender and set Message Contains to a keyword. Toggle on Automation and keep Confirm Before Run toggled off. 5. Add the Get Contents of URL action. Paste the webhook URL, set the method to POST and add the Authorization and Content-Type headers provided by Grok Bot. 6. Set the request body to JSON. Add source with the value imessage-shortcut, and message with the incoming message variable, not fixed text. 7. Have someone send the keyword via iMessage. Check that Grok Bot receives the message and runs the routine. WHAT COULD YOU DO WITH THIS? Set a trigger keyword in Shortcuts, such as GROK, and restrict it to a chosen sender. When a matching message arrives, Shortcuts forwards it to your webhook. Configure your Grok Bot routine to recognise the commands below and start only the jobs you've authorised. GROK BRIEF — Start a calendar, email and priorities briefing. GROK RESEARCH: [topic] — Have your research bot investigate a topic. GROK BILL: [provider] — Ask your bot to investigate your latest bill. GROK TEAM CHECK — Have your Chief of Staff gather updates from your bot team. GROK PREP: [meeting] — Start meeting preparation using your connected information. These are example workflows to configure, not jobs I tested today. THE BIGGER OPPORTUNITY This isn't really about iMessage. It's about using activity in other apps to trigger Grok Bot. Instead of your bots constantly checking whether something has happened, an event can tell them when to start. And once one Grok Bot routine starts, it can coordinate other bots to complete the job, subject to the permissions you've given them. My test confirmed that an incoming iMessage can launch a Grok Bot routine and deliver the actual message content. That's a very different way to think about Grok Bot. Don't just give Grok Bot jobs. Give it events that tell it when to start.

Here’s a few of my 15 member grok @bot team and how they work together: I run a real estate business, recruit agents, teach AI classes and manage my own properties. Until @bot, it all ran out of Claude projects, one per area, plus a Hermes agent on its own server. Now most of it runs on Grok Bot. Here's how it's built. 1. One job per bot Each bot is like a person I'd hire for one role. Inbox triages email. TC Desk runs transactions. My eXp tracks my organization and revenue share. Social writes and schedules posts through HighLevel. Skooler posts in my Skool community. Addie runs Meta ads. Tubester edits and uploads YouTube. Hubster watches referral groups. Each one stays in its lane. 2. One boss bot Chief of Staff is the one I talk to all day. Need a reminder? Tell Chief. Want to know how the ads are doing? Ask Chief. It goes to Addie and comes back with the answer. 3. Bots hand off to bots When a call ends, Granola fires a webhook. Chief catches it, reads the transcript and sends it to the right bot. Inbox hands deal emails to TC Desk. Tubester hands finished video to Social. They all run on one virtual machine, so files move between them, but each bot has its own profile with its own desktop and browser. 4. Skills carry over A skill is a folder of markdown instructions. Skills I built in Claude work in Grok Bot. 5. Humans approve the stuff that matters Nothing sends without my Send button. Ad budgets need my OK. Posts go live only after I approve them. 6. Own something I still keep Hermes, an open source harness, on a desktop at home and a VPS that runs about $10 a month. Grok Bot does about 90% of what it did, but owning one harness keeps my options open. If you can do it on your computer, a bot can probably do it. Start with one job. Email is a good first one. joinaibuilders.org

A few people have been asking about my Grok Bot setup. This is one of the skills I actively use. It’s called /optimize. A reusable skill for checking and improving speed, e.g. • N+1 SQL queries → joins or batched reads. • Repeated database reads → caching or Redis where it makes sense. • Serverless connections → connection pooling. • Sequential API calls → parallel requests. • Heavy JavaScript → code splitting and lazy loading. • Blocking tasks → background jobs. • Waiting for a full AI response → token streaming. It measures first, applies safe fixes on a separate branch, then runs the same tests again. You get the before-and-after results and a list of what it couldn’t measure. We used it on a simple internal app we were building. It found a duplicate page load and repeated data reads. Fixing those cut the time from choosing a role to seeing the overview by 32–40% on repeat visits. Free and open source. Setup instructions for Grok Bot, Claude Code and Cursor: github.com/sebbsssss/optimiz…

Grok Bot appears to load only the first 100 skills you've saved yourself, counted A to Z by name. Everything after number 100 is skipped and nothing tells you. I found it when my writing-voice skill stopped working. I had 232 skills of my own. My Bot tested them: number 100 opened, but number 101 and everything after it came back "No skill named…". My Bots had been working without my voice, writing structure and drafting rules. It can also look like a Bot has forgotten how to do something it used to do well. A skill doesn't break on its own. Each new skill that sorts ahead of it pushes it further down the list, and once it passes 100 your Bots quietly stop using it. My voice skill was working in 11 Bots on 30 Oct and wasn't loading in any of them by 8 Nov. It's easy to get there without noticing. Bots save skills on their own when they spot a repeated task. Bot-building Bots give every new Bot several skills plus a getting-started one. Importing a template adds its skills. And deleting a Bot doesn't delete its skills, so they pile up. Skills that come built in or with plugins don't seem to count. Renaming a skill doesn't help either; only its position A to Z matters. To check yours, send your Primary Bot this: "Count the skill folders in /home/box/agent-data/workflows/ on your computer, not just the skills you can see. Then sort them A to Z, try to load the last one by its slug and tell me the count and whether it loaded." If it doesn't load, you're over the limit. To fix it: 1. Back up your skills first. Deleting a skill removes it for every Bot. 2. Delete skills nothing uses and any left behind by Bots you've deleted. 3. Merge overlapping skills into one. 4. If you publish templates: in my test, a published template kept its own copy of its skills. So you can back up a template Bot's skills and remove them from your library, as long as you restore them before updating that template. I went from 232 to 97 and everything loads again. Leave a few spare, because one new skill can push your 100th out. A weekly check that counts your skills and warns you past 90 helps. This is what my Bot found testing my account; Grok Bot doesn't document it. I've reported it to the team.

Needed Grok to access my iCloud emails (read-only, for now) and it didn't have a connector, so I made own, because I can 😅 github.com/cjmellor/inbox-mc… - [irrelevant, but] built with @laravel MCP package - Used Cloudflare MCP to add an `mcp` subdomain - Claude just set it up on my server, I didn't even SSH to it - Connected to Grok Bot, Amp... anything I want now. I love this new way of building

Grok Bot fixes for improved token efficiency and smarter behavior are underway