Grok skills, Cursor paths
Grok App Builder auto-lists .grok/skills. Cursor, Cloud Agents, and Grok Bot do not. A committed symlink is what follows the clone — and Paper still has to sit in the same session as the repo.
The load-bearing discovery is a miss, not a feature. Grok App Builder — xAI’s chat plus a live preview on 0.0.0.0:8080 — auto-lists whatever lives in .grok/skills. Cursor on the same Mac does not. Neither do Cursor Cloud Agents, nor Grok Bot when it hands a coding step to a cloud clone. The four surfaces look like one Grok-on-Cursor blob. They are not.
The repo can still say “you are Grok Build.” AGENTS.md is always on. It tells the agent to go read the Grok pack. It does not put those files on the available-skills list. Without a Read, the agent restyles from memory, or from Paper skills alone. Instruction is not injection.
Grok App Builder and Cursor do not share a skill-discovery path.
First-party session log, Ion Wake, 23 August 2026
What the clone actually sees
Cloud Agents land in /workspace on a Linux VM. They see repo .cursor/rules and .cursor/skills, and home skills on that VM. They do not walk the operator’s laptop ~/.cursor/rules — discovery starts at the checkout and never reaches /home/ubuntu. Account User Rules in Cursor Settings are the documented cloud-synced channel. The Mac installer that links Grok skills into Cursor is not on the VM unless someone copied it or committed the result.
The wiring that shipped that day is small. In git: .cursor/skills is a symlink to ../.grok/skills, plus an always-apply rule that forces a Read of design-ui before overlay work. After a fresh App Builder clone, the operator runs /link-grok-skills, commits .cursor/, and pushes. Then Cloud and Grok Bot coding agents on that repo auto-list the same UI doctrine. The installer stays on the Mac. The clone consumes the symlink.
The artboard the coder cannot see
Paper Desktop is a canvas with MCP — code-to-design pulls live tokens onto the board; design-to-code pushes a delta back. It only works in a session that can see Paper and the repo. This session’s ask was copy: High Scores, IONWAKE, Save Score. The first pass restyled layout and tokens. They reverted the layout and kept the words.
Paper can hold chrome that must never ship — here, an iOS status bar and a decorative ship. A coding agent without Paper invents layout if asked to match the artboard. Grok App Builder has no Paper and no git-as-the-user’s-Mac. The working split is boring: overlay and copy stay in Cursor plus Paper; physics and scoring can go to a Paper-blind coder. Do not send “make it match Paper” to the sandbox.
Peter Diamandis, on a late-August Moonshots tape, put a consumer number next to the teammate surface. He called Grokbot the most genuinely useful consumer AI product he had seen in 2026 — a dedicated cloud computer per bot, parallel specialists, chief-of-staff orchestration, in his implementation. Emad Mostaque said he was running eighteen Grokbots in a swarm, with Tailscale control of an M4 Max, a 5090, and subscriptions. Host hype. Not an independent product review. It does not collapse Grok Bot into Cursor Cloud Agents.