What is grok-build?

grok-build is a fork of Grok Build, which is SpaceXAI's terminal based AI coding agent. The original tool runs as a full screen text interface that can read and understand your codebase, edit files, run shell commands, search the web, and manage long running tasks, either interactively, headlessly for scripts and automation, or embedded inside code editors. What makes this specific fork different is that it lets you run the same coding agent against a local or self hosted language model instead of requiring a Grok account or API key. Supported local model servers include tools like llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, and MLX-serve, as long as they speak an OpenAI compatible interface. On first launch, if you are not signed in, the tool asks you to either paste in the address of your local model server or sign in with a Grok account instead. Once set, that choice is saved so you are only asked once, and you can switch models later with a keyboard shortcut. This fork also publishes ready to use nightly builds for macOS and Linux so people do not need to compile it themselves. Everything else in the README describes the original upstream project unchanged. The tool is written in Rust and organized into several crates, including one for the terminal interface, one for the underlying agent runtime, one for tool implementations like file editing and search, and one for handling the local filesystem and version control interactions. Building from source requires the Rust toolchain and a tool called protoc for generating code from protocol buffer definitions. The project's first party code is released under the Apache License 2.0, though it also bundles some third party and vendored code under their own separate licenses, and the README notes that external contributions are not accepted.