Recently xAI released Grok Build, their version of an AI coding agent like Claude Code. I’ve had a subscription to Grok for a while for chat so I decided to give it a try.
A problem I’ve been having for a while is that I often have a picture or a link or a YouTube video that I’m looking at on my Windows desktop or my Linux laptop want to text to someone from my phone. Or I have an article or video on my phone that I want to consume later on my computer. There isn’t really a clean way for me to do this. If I had a Mac I could just iMessage things to people, but I don’t. So I’ve just been DMing myself on chat apps and then opening the chat on the other device. This works, but I don’t particularly like that the app has all these messages especially when I post something that’s personally identifiable.
So I’ve had an idea for a self-hosted app where you can just message yourself for a while now, but haven’t really acted on it. Behold, the perfect opportunity to put Grok Build through its paces and vibe code it up. I started by talking back and forth with Grok chat about the idea. I’m knowledgeable about AWS and already have an account, so I told it to start there and sketch out what Lambdas and frontend code it would need. We talked through using Cognito for authentication, which almost feels like overkill since I’m the only user but something is certainly needed to keep things secure. I then told it to write everything out into a spec file, which I then handed over to Grok Build and told it to get going.
It did a good job with the code, which didn’t surprise me much. But more importantly I was able to hand it my AWS credentials (not something I’d ever do for a job, but this is a low stakes hobby project so who cares) and told it to create the needed Terraform files and apply for me. This made is so I could iterate incredibly quickly. After a couple of tweaks, the initial spec was fully implemented. But after I could actually see the deployed app for myself I of course immediately got a bunch of ideas for new features. I then just simply started listing out what I wanted and set Grok Build off to do them one by one. It wasn’t perfect as there were several times a new feature caused regression but it was easy enough to point that out and have it course correct.
The app reached the point where it had all the features I needed, so I published a generic version on my Github. I’m an engineer, not a marketer, but SelfDrop seemed like a fitting enough name. Honestly, I was pretty excited that I finished a side project over a weekend that would have taken me 2 weeks normally. Admittedly I’m a little late to the fully agentic party, but I’ve been using Copilot in agent mode for over a year so most of this isn’t new to me. I’ll definitely be dusting off some old project ideas that I had shelved because they’d take too much time and throwing AI at them soon.