grok-delegate

Grok Delegate

For a trusted repository rejected by Git's ownership check, the relay supports --trust-git-root <exact-worktree-root>. This opt-in affects only relay Git checks, without persistent Git config or Grok permission changes. See dispatch and poll.

You are the orchestrator. This skill lets you hand a bounded coding task to a separate implementer — the Grok Build CLI (grok) — then review what it produced and land it yourself. You write the brief and own the judgment; Grok does the typing under an explicit autonomy profile; you verify and commit.

Nothing here is specific to one orchestrating agent. The loop needs only the ability to run a shell command and read a file, so it works the same whether you are Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode with a selected model, or any comparable agent. (It is designed for Claude Code and Cursor; treat other orchestrators as designed-for, not yet proven.)

When NOT to use this

• The task is small enough to just do inline — delegation overhead is not worth it.
• The grok CLI is not installed, not authenticated, or the account lacks Grok Build beta access.
• You want to write the code yourself, or you only need a review without an implementer run.

Prerequisites (check once)

1. grok version succeeds. If not, install on any platform with npm i -g @xai-official/grok (or use the installer from xAI's official Grok CLI docs) and authenticate (grok login, or grok login --device-auth on headless hosts, or set XAI_API_KEY).
2. Confirm which grok is on PATH. command -v grok shows the active binary and grok version its version — the relay records the version it ran into result.json, so a stale binary is visible after the fact.
3. You are in (or will point --cd at) the target git repository.

The loop

Run these five steps per task. Steps 1, 4, and 5 are your judgment; 2 and 3 are mechanical.

1. Write the brief

Grok sees only the text you send — no orchestrator chat history, no shared context. Everything the task needs goes in the brief: the goal, the current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's actual gate commands (discover them from the repo's CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/Makefile — do not assume), and a report contract. Tell Grok it will not commit (you will). Keep one task per brief. Full guidance and a template: references/writing-the-brief.md.

2. Dispatch

Send the brief to Grok with the bundled helper. It wraps grok -p, captures the run, and writes a structured result.json — so your only job is "run a command, read a file." (<skill-dir> below is this skill's installed directory — the folder containing this SKILL.md, i.e. the directory you loaded the skill from. Claude Code prints it as "Base directory for this skill" when the skill loads; on other orchestrators use that same directory — if unsure where it landed, run find ~ -name relay.mjs -path '*grok-delegate*' and substitute the directory above it.)

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo
# read-only (review/diagnosis; best-effort — verify touchedFiles): add --read-only
# continue the previous Grok session:       add --resume-last  (send only the delta brief)
# hard time limit (watchdog):               add --timeout 2h  (default: off; implementation runs routinely need 1-2h)
# see all options:                          node .../relay.mjs --help

The helper defaults to a write-capable (workspace-write) autonomy profile — --always-approve plus --sandbox workspace — and writes its artifacts to a temp dir, so the repo under review stays clean. It never commits — see step 5. Mechanics, flags, and the result.json shape: references/dispatch-and-poll.md.

3. Wait for completion

The helper blocks until Grok finishes, so back it with whatever your orchestrator offers and resume when it returns:

• Claude Code: run the Bash call with run_in_background: true; you are notified on completion.
• Plain shell / other agents: run it in the foreground for short tasks, or background it and poll the result file — … & in bash/zsh (including Git Bash/WSL), or your shell's equivalent (Start-Job in PowerShell, start /b in cmd). The run is done when result.json exists with a status. (A pre-run usage error — bad args or an empty brief — instead exits with code 2 and a stderr message and writes no result file, so check the exit code too. A missing grok binary exits 127 but does write a result.json with status grok_unavailable.)

Do not trust progress trackers over reality: a run is finished when result.json is written and the process has exited. Read the working tree, not a status line. The implementer's full report is the finalMessage field in result.json (also printed in full on stdout between the report markers).

4. Review — do not trust the self-report

Grok's result.json includes its own summary and gate claims. Re-verify, don't accept:

• Re-run the project's gates yourself (the test/lint/build commands from step 1). Never take "gates passed" on faith.
• Read the diff against the brief: did Grok do what was asked, nothing more (scope creep) and nothing less? touchedFiles in the result is your starting point.
• Run the relevant guard skills on the diff if you have them installed (clean-code-guard, test-guard, etc. from guard-skills) — this skill produces the work; those skills judge it.
• For schema/migration changes, round-trip them; for removals, grep for dangling references.

Full checklist: references/review-and-land.md.

5. Land it

The orchestrator commits. Only after the gates pass and the diff holds:

• Commit the verified work yourself, with a clear message.
• If it needs changes, send a delta brief with --resume-last (don't restate the whole task) and review again.

Autonomy model

Grok's default permission mode is ask, which blocks on approval prompts in a headless pipe. The relay therefore always sets autonomy explicitly:

Relay flag	What Grok gets	Use when
(default)	--always-approve --sandbox workspace	Normal implementation — writes scoped to the working tree
--read-only	--sandbox read-only --always-approve	Review / diagnosis — kernel-enforced sandbox, not total (see caveat below)
--full-access	--always-approve --sandbox off	Explicit opt-in when the task needs unrestricted tools

--always-approve alone would approve all tools (writes, shell, network) — closer to unrestricted than to a workspace-scoped write. Pairing it with --sandbox workspace is what keeps the default safe. Reach for --full-access only when the human asks for it.

--read-only is kernel-enforced, not total. On grok 1.0.25 the read-only sandbox (Seatbelt on macOS, Landlock on Linux) denies grok's own write/search_replace tools and shell redirects with EPERM, so --always-approve only auto-approves tools inside the sandbox. The profile is not total, though: it still permits writes to /tmp, /var/tmp and ~/.grok/, so a repo under one of those paths is not protected, and on macOS it does not restrict child-process network. Always confirm touchedFiles afterward; treat the diff, not the flag, as the guarantee. The relay automates a reporting tripwire: it compares parsed git porcelain and fingerprints the working-tree identity and index entries of Git-visible paths that were already dirty. readOnlyViolation is true when either signal proves a change, false when coverage is complete and detects none, and null when coverage is incomplete. Ignored paths, submodule internals, perfect restores, and attribution of concurrent changes remain outside it, so the diff review stays the guarantee.

Authorization model

Delegation is something the human opts into. Once they have ("run this queue", "proceed"), committing verified, gate-passing work is the agreed contract — that is the whole point. Two limits on that mandate: surface, don't absorb (report Grok's design decisions, defensible-but-unasked turns, and non-blocking nitpicks rather than silently keeping them) and stop for scope changes (if correct completion needs going beyond the brief, ask — don't expand the mandate yourself). The full treatment is in references/review-and-land.md.

References

• references/writing-the-brief.md — how to write a brief Grok can execute blind: structure, XML blocks, the report contract, embedding the real gate commands.
• references/dispatch-and-poll.md — relay.mjs flags, the result.json contract, backgrounding per orchestrator, and recovery when a run misbehaves.
• references/review-and-land.md — the review checklist, the commit boundary, and the rework cycle via --resume-last.
• references/multi-task-queues.md — running a sequential queue: carrying constraints forward, progress tracking, and the end-of-run coherence check.