1
00:00:08,240 --> 00:00:11,920
So, um, if you've been reading Cursor's
community forum this month,

2
00:00:12,420 --> 00:00:16,880
you've probably seen thread titles like,
"Is Grok Bot eating at Cursor usage?

3
00:00:17,320 --> 00:00:18,760
I thought it had its separate usage?"

4
00:00:19,340 --> 00:00:23,560
And another one, "Grok Bot spend cursor
usage, I can't accept it."

5
00:00:24,200 --> 00:00:26,100
That second one has over a thousand views.

6
00:00:26,640 --> 00:00:27,720
Which tells you something, right?

7
00:00:28,260 --> 00:00:29,620
People are, uh, rattled.

8
00:00:30,197 --> 00:00:35,597
Last episode we were deep in the 43%
desktop migration hangs and the local daemon

9
00:00:35,697 --> 00:00:36,137
flapping.

10
00:00:36,697 --> 00:00:37,797
This week the fight moved.

11
00:00:38,217 --> 00:00:40,937
Nobody's yelling about broken cloud VM
handshakes anymore.

12
00:00:41,357 --> 00:00:45,057
It's all billing dashboards and, and, and
who got charged for what.

13
00:00:45,920 --> 00:00:46,760
Quick honesty note.

14
00:00:47,320 --> 00:00:51,040
I don't have the individual support
tickets or the exact percentages in front of me,

15
00:00:51,460 --> 00:00:53,720
so I'm not going to quote numbers I can't
stand behind.

16
00:00:54,420 --> 00:00:55,640
Here's what I can stand behind.

17
00:00:56,260 --> 00:01:01,660
On August 21, xAI's announcement said
SuperGrok Plus, SuperGrok Heavy,

18
00:01:02,200 --> 00:01:07,120
Cursor Pro+, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor
Teams now include Grok Bot,

19
00:01:07,600 --> 00:01:10,060
and everyone else gets a free trial with
limited usage.

20
00:01:10,700 --> 00:01:15,200
So you've got two quota worlds, Cursor's
and Grok Bot's, sitting right next to each

21
00:01:15,280 --> 00:01:15,460
other.

22
00:01:16,337 --> 00:01:18,217
Now, the resolution people are pointing
to.

23
00:01:18,957 --> 00:01:22,957
This is background from a Cursor forum
thread, not something I've watched happen

24
00:01:22,997 --> 00:01:24,677
myself, so weigh it accordingly.

25
00:01:25,277 --> 00:01:28,377
The claim is that the per model breakdown
was a display problem,

26
00:01:28,837 --> 00:01:30,017
but there's a design catch.

27
00:01:30,677 --> 00:01:34,797
When Grok Bot spins up Cursor cloud agents
for coding, that work is billed to your

28
00:01:34,837 --> 00:01:36,197
Cursor usage by design.

29
00:01:37,045 --> 00:01:38,205
Okay, so, picture it.

30
00:01:38,625 --> 00:01:42,365
Grok Bot is the, the architect, working
off its own expense account.

31
00:01:42,805 --> 00:01:43,805
That's the weekly pool.

32
00:01:44,385 --> 00:01:48,025
But when the architect hires
subcontractors to actually pour the concrete,

33
00:01:48,445 --> 00:01:50,765
those subcontractors swipe your personal
card.

34
00:01:51,385 --> 00:01:52,585
Is that a perfect analogy?

35
00:01:53,165 --> 00:01:53,845
Hmm, no.

36
00:01:54,525 --> 00:01:56,265
But it makes the surprise make sense.

37
00:01:56,845 --> 00:02:00,205
You watched the architect's budget and
forgot the subcontractors exist.

38
00:02:00,953 --> 00:02:05,493
So my take, and it's only my take, is you
want a hard ceiling on on demand spend

39
00:02:05,533 --> 00:02:07,053
before you let any bot loose.

40
00:02:07,673 --> 00:02:11,713
Go look at the usage and billing settings
in your Cursor dashboard and decide what

41
00:02:11,753 --> 00:02:13,313
the worst case is allowed to be.

42
00:02:13,933 --> 00:02:17,393
Because a limit you set beforehand is a
lot cheaper than a limit you discover

43
00:02:17,493 --> 00:02:17,993
afterward.

44
00:02:18,807 --> 00:02:19,287
Quick break.

45
00:02:19,847 --> 00:02:24,567
This episode is brought to you by Jellypod
AI, the easiest platform to create AI

46
00:02:24,687 --> 00:02:26,467
podcasts and generative videos.

47
00:02:26,682 --> 00:02:29,622
So, here's a wrinkle that made the billing
confusion worse.

48
00:02:30,482 --> 00:02:32,322
Where do you even check what changed?

49
00:02:33,022 --> 00:02:38,702
On August 19, the community tracked
changelog noted that xAI still publishes no per

50
00:02:38,802 --> 00:02:41,742
version release notes, which is why that
page exists.

51
00:02:42,342 --> 00:02:46,082
And a Cursor community support engineer,
Colin, said there isn't an official

52
00:02:46,202 --> 00:02:50,922
changelog right now, and the best place to
check for updates is Grok Bot on X.

53
00:02:51,743 --> 00:02:54,463
Which brings me to the directory that
changelog lives on.

54
00:02:55,183 --> 00:03:01,223
On August 31 it said, and I'm quoting,
"Templates are only public x.ai/bot share

55
00:03:01,303 --> 00:03:02,523
links posted on X."

56
00:03:03,423 --> 00:03:05,043
Directory listings stay in the table.

57
00:03:05,463 --> 00:03:06,943
The changelog doesn't say why.

58
00:03:07,683 --> 00:03:11,943
I'd read it as a trust boundary, um,
you're installing something a real author

59
00:03:12,083 --> 00:03:15,443
published in public, not something scraped
from who knows where.

60
00:03:16,143 --> 00:03:18,003
But that's my reading, not theirs.

61
00:03:18,797 --> 00:03:24,137
And, uh, the site calls itself a sponsor
free directory that is not an official xAI

62
00:03:24,177 --> 00:03:24,617
product.

63
00:03:25,157 --> 00:03:26,137
Worth keeping in your head.

64
00:03:27,075 --> 00:03:29,615
Now the fun part, what people are actually
building.

65
00:03:30,435 --> 00:03:32,835
Two original listings, Sanity and Jess.

66
00:03:33,495 --> 00:03:34,995
Sanity is a content desk.

67
00:03:35,475 --> 00:03:39,135
Per the directory, it turns a brief into a
paste ready draft in Sanity,

68
00:03:39,615 --> 00:03:40,735
and it does not publish.

69
00:03:41,415 --> 00:03:45,315
The changelog says it plainly, CMS drafts,
no publish.

70
00:03:46,255 --> 00:03:51,295
Jess is an executive assistant, calendar,
email, a short daily list of decisions.

71
00:03:52,035 --> 00:03:55,055
The listing says she doesn't send or
change events without asking.

72
00:03:56,012 --> 00:03:56,712
Notice the pattern?

73
00:03:57,452 --> 00:03:59,992
Each one is defined by what it refuses to
do.

74
00:04:00,872 --> 00:04:05,572
There's a template on the directory, dr
eggbot, whose description literally says

75
00:04:05,992 --> 00:04:08,972
"explicit anti jobs, no leftover tools."

76
00:04:09,812 --> 00:04:10,832
I love that phrase.

77
00:04:11,592 --> 00:04:13,192
The job tells you what the bot can do.

78
00:04:13,712 --> 00:04:16,172
The anti job tells you how bad your
Tuesday can get.

79
00:04:16,963 --> 00:04:20,123
Which connects to something from xAI's API
release notes.

80
00:04:20,783 --> 00:04:23,243
On September 25 they added a request
field.

81
00:04:23,783 --> 00:04:29,023
Quote, "You can now send
safety_identifier, an opaque end user identifier assigned

82
00:04:29,063 --> 00:04:30,043
by your application."

83
00:04:30,843 --> 00:04:35,723
It lets SpaceXAI attribute a policy
violation to one of your end users rather than

84
00:04:35,763 --> 00:04:36,843
to your API key.

85
00:04:37,813 --> 00:04:40,553
Now, the docs say end user, not agent run.

86
00:04:41,293 --> 00:04:45,693
So, um, how you map bots or runs onto that
identifier is on you,

87
00:04:46,213 --> 00:04:47,513
and that part is my inference.

88
00:04:48,193 --> 00:04:50,133
But the idea is the same as the anti job.

89
00:04:50,793 --> 00:04:52,053
Shrink the blast radius.

90
00:04:52,713 --> 00:04:55,053
One bad actor shouldn't take the whole key
down with it.

91
00:04:55,183 --> 00:04:58,703
And the same thinking shows up in the
changelog on August 29.

92
00:04:59,543 --> 00:05:04,383
One Machine copy is now, quote, "one bot,
one job, one machine each,"

93
00:05:05,023 --> 00:05:07,043
not one job on a shared Grok cloud box.

94
00:05:07,683 --> 00:05:11,543
Compare that to the launch post on
Cursor's forum, which says the computer is

95
00:05:11,623 --> 00:05:16,583
isolated to your account rather than to an
individual Bot, so any login or file you

96
00:05:16,623 --> 00:05:18,743
put there is available to all your Bots.

97
00:05:19,567 --> 00:05:22,147
I'm not going to pretend I've migrated a
setup, I haven't.

98
00:05:22,747 --> 00:05:23,387
But picture it.

99
00:05:23,987 --> 00:05:28,247
One bot is halfway through a long job in a
checkout, another bot wanders in on the

100
00:05:28,307 --> 00:05:28,987
same box...

101
00:05:29,647 --> 00:05:29,827
yeah.

102
00:05:30,587 --> 00:05:33,827
One machine each just removes that whole
category of Tuesday.

103
00:05:34,640 --> 00:05:38,400
So, back to the opening question, who pays
when a bot hires a bot?

104
00:05:39,080 --> 00:05:41,360
You do, unless you've drawn the line
first.

105
00:05:41,940 --> 00:05:46,180
Cap the spend, name the anti jobs, and
give each bot its own room.

106
00:05:47,140 --> 00:05:48,280
Alright, that's it from me.

