A Grok Bot is not a longer prompt. It is an agent that keeps its own instructions, its own enabled skills and its own schedule between conversations, so the twentieth time you ask it for something it behaves the same way as the first. Creating one takes about two minutes. Making one that is worth keeping is a question of what you write in it, which is most of what this guide is about.
Before you start
You need a Grok account with Grok Bot available on it, at x.ai/bot. There is a desktop app for macOS and Windows as well as the web version. An account can hold up to 50 Bots and group chats combined, which is enough to keep a working set of specialists rather than one general assistant.
Step 1: give it one job
Choose New, then Create new agent. The first decision is the one that matters: a Bot with one job outperforms a Bot with four, every time. A Bot that reviews code is useful. A Bot that reviews code, writes marketing copy and books meetings is a worse version of the model you already have.
A useful test before you go further: can you say what the Bot does in one sentence, without the word and? If not, it is two Bots.
Step 2: write the description
Open Bot actions, then Edit Profile. The description is where the durable rules go, the ones that should apply in every conversation rather than in one. xAI's own example of a good line is a constraint rather than a capability: never change production settings.
This is the field that decides whether the Bot is any good, and it is where almost everybody underinvests. A persona and a paragraph gives you a chattier version of the same model. What changes the output is specificity:
- Ranking. Say what comes first. A code review Bot that ranks by blast radius returns something different from one told to find bugs.
- Refusals. Say what it must never do. Never invent a statistic. Never send anything. Never approve an expense.
- Failure cases. Name the ways the job is usually done badly, and tell it to avoid them by name.
- Output shape. Say what comes back and in what order, and tell it to stop rather than offer to continue.
If you want to see what that looks like at length, every one of our 51 Grok Bot templates publishes the rules it carries, and Mon, the design Grok Bot is a good one to read first because the standards it holds are concrete enough to argue with.
Step 3: enable only the skills it needs
Skills are what the Bot can reach: web browsing, a cloud computer, connected plugins. Most of the Bots we publish need web browsing and nothing else, and the four that read an account of yours say so on the page, including Reply for an inbox. Enable the ones the job needs and nothing else. A Bot with access to an inbox it never has to read is a Bot with a larger blast radius than its job requires.
Skills also accumulate. When the Bot has done a multi step process a few times and the process is stable, ask it to save that as a skill, and it becomes repeatable rather than re-explained.
Step 4: add a routine, last and narrow
A routine is when the Bot runs without being asked. Add it after the Bot has done the job correctly a few times by hand, never before. Scope it to business hours rather than always on: an agent that wakes every fifteen minutes to find nothing costs money to learn what a schedule would have told it. There is more on this in the guide to Grok Bot routines.
Step 5: share it as a template
Open Bot settings and choose Share as template. Anybody with the link sees a preview and an Add to Grok Bot control, and adding it creates a copy on their own account. What travels is the identity, the description, the skills and the routines. What does not travel is the conversation history, anything the Bot has learned, and attachments.
Before you share, read the description as a stranger would. Sharing copies the configuration, so any account name, internal process or customer detail written into it goes with it.
What to build first
Pick something you would otherwise do yourself in under ten minutes, and do it every week. A morning briefing is the usual first one, which is what Pulse does, or a code review that ranks by what breaks in production rather than by what it noticed first, which is Diff. The first Bot that saves you an hour teaches you more about writing the description than any amount of planning. Then take the second one from a template rather than a blank field: design, marketing, engineering and operations Grok Bots are all written and ready to copy, and 40 of them install in one click.
Where the Bot's output goes
A Grok Bot that designs, writes or reviews something is producing work that ends up in a codebase. The design templates for the tool you build in are covered by the same licence, so the Bot and the screens it produces come from one place: Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex and Cursor templates. If you are choosing a tool rather than a Bot, how to build an app with AI covers that decision.