xAI Ships Grok Build v0.2.96 With New Agent Tools

SAN FRANCISCO — SpaceXAI is keeping up a rapid release cadence for Grok Build, its terminal-based coding agent, pushing version 0.2.96 on July 10 with a batch of upgrades aimed at developers running long, autonomous coding sessions. The update lands with Grok 4.5, the company's strongest model to date, now serving as the default engine inside Grok Build.

What's New in v0.2.96

The release adds a new /goal slash command for setting a session objective, a refreshed /sessions flow, and a x.ai/pr/status check that reports whether an open pull request has reached the merge queue. System notifications now carry structured titles and bodies for cleaner rendering, a compact mode activates automatically on very small terminals, and the up arrow on an empty prompt browses prompt history that can be searched with /history.

Under the hood, SpaceXAI improved reliability of bash and file output, made subagent activity easier to follow with live task labels, and sped up startup on large repositories. Teams can now tune MCP tool-output truncation per repository through a .grok/config.toml file. The steady stream of refinements continues the momentum from Grok Build's earlier expansion into cloud sandboxes.

Grok 4.5 Does the Heavy Lifting

The quiet headliner is Grok 4.5 becoming the default model. Trained across tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and developed alongside coding tool Cursor, Grok 4.5 is tuned for real software-engineering work and posts competitive scores on demanding benchmarks like Terminal Bench and SWE Bench Pro. Just as important for developers is efficiency: the model runs at roughly 80 tokens per second and solves tasks with about 4.2 times fewer output tokens than comparable leading models.

That efficiency translates directly into cost. Grok 4.5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, a competitive rate that SpaceXAI argues delivers the highest intelligence per unit of time and cost. The model is available now in Grok Build, in Cursor on all plans, and through the SpaceXAI console, part of the broader Grok 4.5 rollout the company detailed this month.

Building Toward an Everyday Developer Tool

Beyond raw coding, SpaceXAI is positioning Grok Build as a general-purpose work agent. The company highlights the model's ability to build multi-sheet Excel models with web research baked in, assemble PowerPoint decks using native shapes, and draft clear prose in Word, backed by official plugins for each Office app. According to SpaceXAI's own release notes, the goal is a tool reliable enough to run for hours at a time while a developer focuses elsewhere.

One caveat remains for European users: Grok 4.5 is not yet available in the EU across SpaceXAI products or the API console, with availability expected in mid-July. For everyone else, the combination of a faster, cheaper flagship model and a steadily maturing agent underscores how quickly SpaceXAI is turning Grok into a practical daily driver for engineers, with new builds landing almost weekly.