Grok CLI Review (2026): Which One You Actually Mean

Try Begin.sh → Official site

Two projects answer to grok cli

The first is xAI's own product. It is presented as a coding agent for complex work, currently running on Grok 4.6, distributed as a single shell install command from the vendor's domain, with documentation, a changelog and an open source page linked directly from the product page. The second is a repository of that name maintained under a different GitHub organisation entirely, unaffiliated with xAI. Only the contents of the vendor's page could be verified for this review, so nothing here should be read as an assessment of the community project. What matters practically is that install instructions you find in a blog post may belong to either one. Check the organisation that publishes the code before you pipe an install script into your shell, because the two are not interchangeable.

Installation is one line

The vendor puts the install command on the front of the product page: a curl fetch of an install script from x.ai piped into bash, which is the same pattern most terminal agents now use and carries the same caveat. Read the script before running it if you are on a machine that matters. Access is advertised as free to try, with a separate developer console and an API documentation site for anyone building on the model rather than using the agent. There is also a published changelog, which is the page to bookmark: in a category shipping weekly, the changelog tells you whether a tutorial from three months ago still describes the tool you just installed.

Plan mode is the differentiator

The feature that deserves attention is the plan viewer. For complex tasks you start in plan mode, and every edit is blocked until you approve the plan. You can approve it wholesale, comment on individual steps, or rewrite it entirely, and approved changes then arrive as clean diffs. That inverts the usual failure mode of agentic coding, where the tool has already rewritten six files by the time you understand what it thought you meant. There is a related detail worth noting: ambiguous requests trigger a short multiple-choice question, asking you to pick a design direction, a framework or a schema, and the answers feed straight into the plan. Both features trade a few seconds up front against reviewing work that went the wrong way.

Skills, plugins and parallel subagents

Three more capabilities round out the tool. Skills adapt it to your workflow, with AGENTS.md files, plugins, hooks and MCP servers all working out of the box; a skill can be auto-invoked when a task matches or called by name, and any session can be captured as a new skill with a slash command. Plugins bundle skills, agents, hooks and MCP servers behind a single install, either from a marketplace or self-hosted from any git repository, with Linear, Sentry, Postgres and browsers named as examples. Subagents run in parallel, each with its own context window, and can be launched into their own worktrees. That last detail is the one experienced users will notice, because parallel agents sharing a single checkout is how people corrupt a branch.

When the terminal is the wrong starting point

All of the above assumes you have a repository worth pointing an agent at. A good share of what people want from these tools is simpler: one landing page, a small site, a copy of a layout they like, a basic app for a client. Installing an agent, granting it shell access and learning its approval model is a lot of ceremony for an artefact you will touch twice. Begin.sh handles that case from the browser. You give it a prompt or a URL to clone, and it returns a working static site or an Expo app as a downloadable zip. No hosting, no backend, no auth, so it is useless for anything needing accounts, and the fastest route to everything else.

What the official tool ships with

Terminal agent against a browser builder

Trying it without regretting it

1. Confirm which project you found
   The vendor's own agent is linked from its product page and installs from its own domain. A same-named repository under another organisation is separate software with separate maintainers.
2. Read the install script
   The documented setup pipes a remote script into bash. On any machine you care about, fetch it first and read it, the same as you would for any other tool.
3. Begin in plan mode
   Give it a task worth planning, such as an auth migration, and use the viewer. Approving or rewriting a plan costs seconds and prevents edits you did not intend.
4. Isolate the subagents
   If you fan work out to parallel subagents, put them in their own worktrees. The tool supports that, and sharing one checkout across concurrent agents is how branches get corrupted.

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