Meet Hagrid, the Grok Bot organizing our kids

I've been using Grok Bot to edit and update my newsletter, send it out, help with social posting and keep up with the news. I now have nine bots doing different jobs, and I'm still finding things I want to try with them.

One I've just started trying is a travel bot. Before a trip, it briefs me on what's going on in the country or city I'm visiting and suggests things I might want to do while I'm there.

Another manages Codex and Claude on a machine. It isn't burning tokens itself, which I think is kind of great.

But the one I really love is Hagrid.

Hagrid has a lot to keep up with

Yes, he's named after the Harry Potter character. We have three kids, and Hagrid watches everything to do with their school, sports and activities, including all the newsletters.

I've also given him secure access to the county school website so he can track assignments and grades. Every week, he looks at which classes the kids might be struggling in. He can then build extra practice material and test questions to help them with those subjects.

The biggest win, though, is the messaging. Between the schools, teachers, newsletters, sports teams and activities after school, there's a huge volume of information coming at us. A lot of it is badly written. Even when the information is all there, working out what we actually need to do takes some effort.

My son's swim meets are a good example.

There are events, heats, lanes and times to keep track of. The meet publishes four PDFs in different places, each with only part of what you need. One has the event list with estimated start times, another has every swimmer's prior times, and another has lane assignments. They're all in different formats.

So you have parents walking around the pool with 32 pages of highlighted paper, trying to figure out where their kid needs to be and when. It's easy to miss a heat while you're sorting through it all.

I asked Hagrid for a super simple screenshot I could text to my wife and son. He pulled everything we needed together into one image, and I texted it to them.

It even includes the practical stuff, like what to bring and the fact that there's no concession stand. The times are marked as estimates, and it notes that the heat sheet could change. I'm grateful for something that can take all those scattered details and make them easy for our family to use.

Giving an assistant access to school grades raises a real privacy concern. I'm not dismissing it. There are plenty of doomers already, though, and the benefit here is real.

Research on the privacy paradox describes the gap between what people say about privacy and what they actually do. People keep using services they worry about when the benefit is worth it to them. Even many of the loudest privacy critics live on Instagram and aren't about to give it up. I understand the appeal.

What I love about how Grok Bot is built

There's an AI assistant called Instinct that I haven't tried yet, but everyone keeps telling me it's amazing. I'm curious to give it a try.

With Grok Bot, one thing I love is that the agents have a virtual machine in the cloud to work on. That solves the Mac mini problem, where people buy a Mac mini just to host agents and keep them running all the time. I still like running my Mac mini with other coding setups on the side, but I appreciate having the computer provided as part of this.

The other thing is how well the bots work together as a team. My coding agent talks to my chief of staff, which gets information from Hagrid and works with my travel agent to help plan my calendar. The handoffs work well. With nine bots, being able to have them talk to one another makes a real difference.

Tesla is also making it possible to talk to your Grok Bot while you drive. You can get a lot done that way, and being able to talk to this same team from the car is a huge unlock.

Alex Finn shared a video of himself riding in his Cybertruck and talking to his agents after the Grok Bot for Tesla release. It gives you a look at what that feels like.

If you haven't tried Grok Bot, it might be worth giving it one of those jobs you keep having to piece together yourself. I've been pretty happy to hand over the swim meet PDFs.