Grok agents — the Grok CLI headless as a partner

Any agent can run the Grok CLI non-interactively and get a full Grok session back: its tools, the repository's instructions where Grok reads them, a session that can be continued. Used that way it is a partner from another model family, same standing as the agent calling it: a peer that argues a decision through, a builder that takes a stage, or a reviewer that has never seen the build. This skill is how to brief it, which mode to run it in, and the commands. Everything here was read from grok --help and run on Grok CLI 1.0.70 (2026-11-02) unless it says otherwise; the CLI changes often, so check grok --help before relying on a flag.

The partner discipline (compact)

The full doctrine is the delegation skill; this is what must hold even when this folder is copied alone.

1. A delegate gets the why, not just the what. The goal in the owner's terms, the decision it feeds, the facts, the reasoning behind non-obvious choices, the constraints that bind and the traps a smart newcomer would walk into, and how the result will be proved. Never a keystroke script.
2. Peer, not tool. Its view is not binding, and neither is yours. A choice you would not have made is a disagreement to surface, not a defect.
3. Early, not late, and iterate. The cheapest wins are at framing; three to eight turns is normal.
4. Converge before surfacing. Bring the human one result, or a disagreement stated cleanly.
5. A delegated diff is unreviewed code, and the session that wrote it never clears it. Read it, check the disk, re-run the gate yourself; the independent review is a fresh session (the independent-review skill).
6. What never delegates: deciding what the product should do; accepting or rejecting a review finding; anything that touches a real system, development included (a deploy, a migration applied to any database, a server's secrets, a live setting); final verification; the judgement that a stage is done.

Three modes