Grok for Developers: Advanced — Agentic Engineering with Grok Build

Agentic engineering with Grok Build: plan before coding, split work across subagents and parallel worktrees, add hooks and guardrails, share skills and plugins through team marketplaces, run Grok Build headless in scripts and CI, lock down permissions and sandboxing for a whole organization, and control cost and speed

What this course covers

The course runs across 8 topics, each one a short adaptive session rather than a recorded lecture. The tutor explains the idea, works an example, checks understanding, and adjusts the next step to the answer given.

Planning before coding — Use /plan so only the plan file can change until you approve it, review it with /view-plan, and send it back until it is right. For long, hard tasks with measurable success criteria, use /goal with an optional --budget, which only completes when most reviewer subagents agree.
Subagents, custom agents and parallel work in worktrees — Use the built-in general-purpose, explore and plan subagents (explore and plan can't edit or use the shell) and define custom agents in .grok/agents/. Run parallel work in separate git worktrees with grok -w or /fork --worktree, land results with ordinary git review, and clean up with grok worktree rm or gc.
Hooks and guardrails — Write a PreToolUse hook in .grok/hooks/ that reads the tool call from stdin and blocks risky commands by returning decision deny with a reason or exiting with code 2. Hooks fail open on timeouts or crashes, and project hooks must be trusted first, so back them with deny rules and test them.
Skills, plugins and team marketplaces — Package team know-how as SKILL.md skills (run as /<skill-name>) and bundle skills, agents, hooks and MCP servers into plugins others can install from a team marketplace source. Grok Build also reads existing Claude Code plugins and skills, so review what a repo brings in before you trust it.
Headless Grok Build in scripts and CI — Run grok -p with --output-format json or streaming-json, --no-auto-update, --max-turns and a sandbox profile, and prefer --permission-mode dontAsk with narrow --allow rules over --always-approve. Pass XAI_API_KEY from the CI secret store and have the job open a branch or comment for human review instead of pushing.
Security: permissions, sandbox and locked organization settings — Combine deny rules, sandbox profiles and hooks against prompt injection from untrusted repos, issues and tool output. Admins lock settings in a root-owned /etc/grok/requirements.toml, for example disable_bypass_permissions_mode and a pinned sandbox profile, alongside SSO and team-level zero data retention.
Cost and speed: model choice, effort and context — Pick the model and reasoning effort per task, keep context lean with focused rules files, /compact and the explore subagent, and cap runs with --max-turns or a /goal budget. Measure cost per task from real runs rather than guessing.
Capstone: an automated team workflow — Automate one team workflow end to end with Grok Build: a plan, a guardrail hook with deny-rule backstop, a least-privilege headless job, a shared skill or plugin, and a cost note based on measured runs.

Skills you build

Results are measured against named skills in the OneRange taxonomy of more than 10,000 skills, so a manager sees proficiency per skill rather than a completion tick.

Who it is for

Software developers and technical builders. The material is pitched at advanced level, and takes roughly 150 minutes at a typical pace. Because every session adapts, someone who already knows a topic moves through it quickly instead of sitting through an explanation they do not need.

It sits in the Tool: Grok track of the Vero AI Catalog, and can be assigned to one person, a team, or the whole company.

How it is delivered and assessed

Delivery is conversational and interactive, including guided lab, code lab, branching scenario exercises. There is no video to sit through and no slide deck to click past.

Understanding is checked with a tool assessment of 5 items, with a pass mark of 70%.

Administrators can copy this course into their own library and adapt it — edit the outline, change the duration, swap the assessment format, or ground it in internal documentation so answers cite the company's own source material.

Also in this track

Grok: Advanced — Power Workflows & Automation — This course fills the step between everyday fluency and building on the platform: running Grok at an expert level without writing code. Learners design multi-step workflows, automate recurring work with live monitoring setups and research routines, and set personal systems that compound over weeks. They finish as the person on the team others come to for Grok technique.
Grok: Mastery — Leading Work with Grok — Lead reliable work with Grok through delegation, description, discernment and diligence. Package your expertise for the team, check every output, supervise the agent features you actually have and measure impact honestly, with no technical background needed.
What's New in Grok for Everyone — A short refresher on the latest Grok for Everyone updates
Grok for Developers: Mastery — xAI API & Building — Build reliable agents on the xAI API: the Responses API and function calling, optional web and X search with verified citations, guardrails enforced in your own code, and measurable controls for cost, retries and rollback. All labs use a fake client, so no live keys are needed.
Grok: Core — Skills, Connectors & Automations — A hands-on working level for experienced Grok users in any role. Set Grok up the way you work, get precise answers from long documents, teach Grok your recurring tasks with Skills, bring work in through the connectors and Office or Google add-ins your company allows, track news with sourced search, and put recurring jobs on a schedule with Automations. No code, no command line, no admin settings.
Grok for Developers Pathway — Grok for developers from coding in chat to Grok Build in the terminal, agentic engineering, and guarded production integrations on the Grok API. Also includes 4 optional playbooks (Testing, Code Review, Refactoring & Migration, Docs & Onboarding) to take any time after Essentials; they don't count toward the certificate.

Frequently asked questions

How long does this course take?

It runs roughly 150 minutes at a typical pace. Because every session adapts, someone who already knows a topic moves through it quickly instead of sitting through an explanation they do not need.

How is it assigned to a team?

An administrator assigns it from the Vero dashboard to one person, a team, a department or the whole company, and sees progress and results per person and per skill.

Can we customise it with our own documents and terminology?

Yes. Administrators can copy this course into their own library and adapt it — edit the outline, change the duration, swap the assessment format, or ground it in internal documentation so answers cite the company's own source material.

Course code TUL-GRK-DEV-251.