Grok CLI Cheatsheet - xAI Grok Build Terminal Coding Agent

Grok CLI is xAI's terminal coding agent. Its shape matches the other terminal agents, and the honest reason to reach for it is usually not a feature difference but that you already hold xAI quota or want its retrieval augmentation. This sheet covers installation and authentication, interactive sessions, headless mode for scripts, and subcommands with MCP. Only three things need doing, and order matters: solve authentication first, because the binary is a single Rust executable whose first launch goes through a browser flow, so CI and headless boxes need XAI_API_KEY instead; then pick the run shape, interactive for exploration and -p when you want capturable output in a pipeline; and only then configure models, in the user-level config file rather than on the command line, so the same setup copies across machines. What sets this tool apart from the other terminal agents in this batch is its configuration inspection: the built-in inspect command enumerates the config, skills, hooks and MCP servers discovered for the current directory, which removes most of the guesswork when it appears to be ignoring your setup.