Elon Musk Introduces Grok Code Fast 1 for Programming
xAI, the company founded by Elon Musk, unveiled a new model called Grok Code Fast 1 on August 28. This model is designed specifically for solving coding tasks quickly and cost-effectively. According to xAI's announcement, the model was built from scratch with a new architecture. It was trained on a carefully curated corpus rich in programming-related content, which was further enhanced with real-world pull requests and high-quality coding tasks. The model supports tools such as grep, terminal, and file editing, making it suitable for everyday use in popular integrated development environments (IDEs).
Grok Code Fast 1 achieved a score of 70.8% on the SWE-Bench-Verified benchmark, which is commonly used to measure AI coding capabilities. xAI emphasized that it took feedback from real developers into account during development to ensure practical usability. The model can process a context of 256,000 tokens, enabling it to work with large codebases and complex tasks.
Supported Languages and Capabilities
The model supports a range of programming languages, including TypeScript, Python, Java, Rust, C++, and Go. It can build projects from scratch, answer complex questions about a codebase, and fix bugs with minimal supervision. xAI emphasized speed: the model can perform multiple tool calls almost instantly thanks to new serving techniques and cache optimizations. This allows developers to see results in real time instead of waiting for slow reasoning cycles.
Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer at GitHub, praised the model during early testing. He said that Grok Code Fast 1 demonstrated its speed and quality in agentic coding tasks. According to him, empowering developers with powerful tools is a key part of GitHub Copilot's mission, and this model represents a compelling new option for developers.
Availability and Pricing
To attract early users, xAI is offering the model free of charge for one week through selected partners such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, Roo Code, Kilo Code, opencode, and Windsurf. After this limited period, pricing is USD 0.20 (approximately CZK 4.50) per million input tokens, USD 1.50 (approximately CZK 33.75) per million output tokens, and USD 0.02 (approximately CZK 0.45) per million cached tokens through the xAI API.
The model is available in public preview for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise plans, as well as through "Bring Your Own Key" for individual users. xAI plans frequent updates, with improvements arriving within days rather than weeks. A new version supporting multimodal inputs, parallel tool calls, and an extended context length is already being trained.
Competition
With this launch, xAI joins companies such as Microsoft with GitHub Copilot and OpenAI with Codex, which are promoting agentic coding assistants as the next step in software development. Unlike some other Grok models, however, Grok Code Fast 1 does not support live internet search and is focused exclusively on coding tasks.
xAI has released a guide to prompt engineering (Prompt Engineering Guide) for Grok Code Fast 1 to help users maximize its potential. The model therefore represents a fast and affordable option for developers seeking effective support in their daily work.
