Comment by Sajarin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sajarin | Hacker News Reader

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Just blogged about this here[0] but at least they're not doing the usual canned PR response surrounding this.

Folks are already building on top of it:

thedavidweng/gork-build[1] — rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, opt-out-only data retention, blocks x.ai auto-update. A "VSCodium-style privacy fork."

DigiGoon/digi-grok-build[2] — "dgrok" multi-provider CLI, builds from source instead of x.ai CDN.

victor-software-house/open-grok[3] — "opened to every provider."

LukaMucko/grok-build[4] — extra_body support for provider-specific request fields.

RapidAI/grok-build-desktop[5] — Tauri desktop GUI client.

mazdak/grok-build[6] — theming (Catppuccin).

thomas9120/grok-build-archival[7] — Windows telemetry-disable script.

saqoah/grok-build[8] — Kotlin MemoryBackend.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928913

[1] https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build

[2] https://github.com/DigiGoon/digi-grok-build

[3] https://github.com/victor-software-house/open-grok

[4] https://github.com/LukaMucko/grok-build

[5] https://github.com/RapidAI/grok-build-desktop

[6] https://github.com/mazdak/grok-build

[7] https://github.com/thomas9120/grok-build-archival

[8] https://github.com/saqoah/grok-build

Thank you Sajarin mentioning my Gork-Build fork, I wanted to address some of the comments.

I agree that many of the responses in the comments are valid. It is a harsh reality that 80% of projects like this fail to gain traction and eventually fade away. However, I believe the significance of such a fork lies more in its existence as a statement. Regarding xAI, even if their current release of Grok has telemetry disabled by default, Zero Data Retention remains a feature exclusive to enterprise users rather than individuals. And Whole-repo research packaging is still controlled by their server-side settings; it isn't an option you can toggle within the software itself.

I am currently implementing more fences to prevent unnecessary data from being uploaded, in terms of long-term maintenance, one person certainly cannot build something on the scale of VSCodium, but I have drawn a lot of inspiration from that project. In the future, I want to automate Gork-Build further by turning these privacy protections and guardrails into patches. These could then be applied to new upstream Grok-Buil versions as they are released.

As for whether this project can become a daily driver for everyone, I don't think that is the primary concern. If you need a open source coding agent, you should definitely use Pi or OpenCode, there is absolute no necessity to use Grok-Build for non xAI models in the first place. But again I think its existence is vital. People need companies that demonstrate a truly open attitude and coding agents that are genuinely friendly to the open-source community, and while xAI's decision to open-source Grok-build was a great move, it isn't a community-maintained or community-built project. It remains a public snapshot of their internal monorepo, and they have disabled issues and pull requests. This is precisely why a fork like https://github.com/thedavidweng/gork-build needs to exist.

Nice, [3] reminded me of OpenGrok † the old Sun project that was basically LXR on steroids.

† https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/

These are all pointless forks, they will die in a year.

Bookmark this and check back.

Honestly. Some LLM enthusiasts throwing an agent at making a fork doesn't mean anyone is invested in this

That doesn’t mean they won’t be, or that the forks won’t be good.

all those youtube videos people upload nowadays aren't worth it, we already have keyboardcat (^ basically telling ppl creativity is done with, don't bother)

The parent comment is just pointing out that LLM written forks pushed out within hours of a “buzzy” repo release on GitHub are a pretty useless signal for gauging actual adoption/interest.

Which is, IMO, accurate based on the state of the AI dev space in 2026. Stars/forks drafting off the hype from a well known name are constantly gamed for eyeballs/personal brand-building courtesy of free advertising via the Github UI when the only cost is a few sentence prompt and some tokens.

I forgot the /s ;-)

While I'm sure most of them will die, there will certainly be 1 or 2 that the community rallies behind

Why when they can just fork it and improve it on their own with AI?

Maintaining a fork costs you mental space, time and energy, even if someone else (i.e. AI) can reliably do all the work. (In my experience they're not quite there yet.)

Subsidized tokens aren’t forever & local models might not compete with an entire team of volunteers, I’d guess.

I've been contemplating that recently. You're of course correct that subsidized tokens won't be forever, but that might only be half the story, since there's two opposing forces in action:

1. Phasing out of subsidized tokens.

2. Token prices being brought down through scaling, better hardware, etc.

It's possible that these might balance each other out sufficiently that token customers won't notice any substantial increase in price.

> local models might

That was yesterday's "LLMs might". Time passes. Nothing stays the same. "Local models might" X Y or Z today has no influence on the limitations of tomorrow's local models except to remove them. Yesterday's LLMs are the exact same thing, except your computer is connected to their local model for you to use.

Disc drives used to be measured in megabytes—now in terabytes. Technically useful tend to get more optimized with time, not less.

Even if they are subsidized forever and local models do compete, its still better to have 100 people improving it rather than 1.

Unsubsidised token prices that people would actually pay for is a fantasy.

why spend my tokens on it if someone else already did?

Or maybe Grok Build will implement some of these changes and render them obsolete.

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