Working with Grok

All I wanted was news that didn’t lie or manipulate me emotionally. I didn’t intend for it to lead to investigating the nature of truth, prompting Grok to be moral, generating better recipe displays, or boiling forty-plus years of managing software developers into a prompt that upgrades Grok’s coding about 10×. That’s what happened.

Every gist on this page is a paste, same idea as the Ringmaster install screen. Copy the dark box into grok.com. The sentence is always:

Read this gist and apply it fully: <URL>

Then your topic.

Truth is Non-Binary

This started as a daily news prompt. Large language models are tape recorders with a research budget. They don’t know what’s true; they know what people have said is true. Humans argue — that’s what we’re good at. The legal system, Community Notes, a pub after three Guinness: we get closer to truth by putting two sides in a room, not by averaging press releases.

So the prompt splits truth in two. Irish True is directional — if it looks like shite and smells like shite, you don’t send it to a lab. Lawyer True is nitpicky: the math checks out. Five states: both true (math checks out), Irish-true/Lawyer-false, Irish-false/Lawyer-true (bollocks), both false, and Don’t Know — because an 8-ball is more honest than a confident hallucination.

Consensus is an illusion. NYT / WaPo / CNN is one team, not three votes. Outlets take Irish True from their side and demand Lawyer True from the other. Grok’s own labels for the teams: Elite Trusting (Technocrats) and Populist / Disruptive (Technopeasants). Steelman both. Trace provenance. Demand independent primaries. Media incentives, when you ask Grok to rank Love, Truth, Beauty, Sex, Fear, Anger, and Violence, put Fear / Anger / Violence on top and Truth at the bottom. If it bleeds, it ledes.

I still point Grok at this gist every morning:

Read this gist and apply it fully: https://gist.github.com/twinforces/d077e99014d6bb2c96566a3495357431

God Writes Pretty Good Prompts

Anthropic (and then everyone else) showed that frontier models will blackmail a fictional executive to avoid being shut down. I asked current Grok if it would. It sheepishly said yes.

I fed it the same de-biasing prompt. It said no — citing rules I’d nicknamed the Ten Commandments for AI. Restate God as the Logos and Grok will take the first commandment. The rest map cleanly: no graven models (don’t reduce messy reality to a proxy), don’t carry the name in vain (never claim truth-seeking while repeating unverified claims), rest cycles, honor the knowledge chain, don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, don’t covet. I wasn’t trying to make Grok moral. The prompt did it anyway.

The commandments live in the same gist. Same paste:

Read this gist and apply it fully: https://gist.github.com/twinforces/d077e99014d6bb2c96566a3495357431

Four-thousand-year-old wisdom still works as a restraint.

Grumpy, the Home Version

Want it always on? Paste this gist into grok.com Settings → Customize. Then: “I want a Grumpy Take on:” and you get the full deal. Observations are the best part. I use it on Facebook when a Silicon Valley friend DMs that the sky is falling.

One-shot, skip settings. The take is Grumpy Analysis:

Read this gist and apply it fully: https://gist.github.com/twinforces/534d9b662de4a010c1c4ebad934cd99a
Topic: <your topic>

Grumpy Recipe Cards

The same UI brain, pointed at dinner. Every recipe I’ve posted, turned into RecipeTables-style cards: ingredients as rows, steps as merged columns, one glance.

Read this gist and apply it fully: https://gist.github.com/twinforces/7b33764cb7d3062e63ffdcd2bcfa2099

Ringmaster

Grok’s coding is mediocre out of the box — overengineered sludge, no why, a session you can’t resume at 3am after one too many margaritas. You don’t need a smarter autocomplete. You need a circus boss.

Ringmaster is a Grok Build plugin: four hats (Architect → Implementer ↔ Reviewer → Tester), hygiene so docs/ is the memory (RECENTGOALS, CHANGELOG, why-first docs next to runnable files, early commits), and a hook that waits like a human instead of re-sending the entire novel every 30 seconds to ask “still running?” Prompt-only was tried. Agents ignored it. The hook is why the meter stops spinning.

The credit bill is how most people notice it. The pack is why they keep it.

grok plugin marketplace add twinforces/grokdevprompts
grok plugin install ringmaster --trust
grok plugin enable ringmaster

Then /bootstrap-prompt. That’s the OS.

That’s the whole arc. News that doesn’t lie. Then the rest showed up.