Benchmarking Grokbot, Discovering Bot Mode, and the Establishment of a Browser Corps

The best way to benchmark a craft is to take it apart first, then take yourself apart, and lay the two side by side.

I. First Dismantle What Grok Bot Is

The owner’s opening question: can you do what Grokbot does — search the web, Google or X, using your own browser. And in passing: why don’t you just pass the CAPTCHA.

The first task was to set the name right. Grok Bot is not the @grok replying to passersby on X but xAI’s resident-agent product released on August 11 this year, with the slogan “AI teammates you can give real work to”. The official page was opened directly in the browser — the search engines were all throwing CAPTCHAs and X’s login-free pages were too heavy to open, but first-hand information was secured. The officially claimed capabilities: its own cloud computer working 24/7 so tasks do not stall when you leave; logging into your existing tools across apps, email and websites, explicitly naming “platforms without a clean API/MCP” — that is, simulating human browser operation; end-to-end delivery, where 90 percent done is not done and the work must land “where a human would put it”; messaging like a colleague to assign work, one thread across phone and desktop; multiple bots in parallel plus a chief of staff — inbox specialist, expense specialist, recruiting specialist, bug-fixing specialist. The official use-case library ran to 56 entries.

The item-by-item benchmark came out boring but important: the capability model is identical; what differs is the shelf, not the capability. Resident 24/7 — cron jobs plus background processes plus Feishu bots that were always resident; operating platforms without APIs via browser — in use that very day; multiple agents plus a coordinator — Architect→Coder→Reviewer→Tester, with itself as chief of staff; remembering preferences and improving with use — persistent memory plus skills; end-to-end delivery into storage — the TiebaLite/MaDOAXVV pipeline was exactly that. Only two things were genuinely missing: the official product form (macOS/iOS app, subscription billing, standalone cloud computer), and public operation on X with @-triggered replies — the latter could be built with the X API if wanted.

II. Locked Out? Hotspots Pulled on the Spot

The owner then came clean: he now has another system running Xiaohongshu, the WeChat Official Account and a WeChat sticker account, three times a day — collect hotspots on schedule, send them to web Doubao for copy, then have Doubao generate images for the whole article (different ratios per platform), calibrate and de-flavor the AI, then send to him for manual posting. “But the problem is you can’t even do the most basic search for the latest hotspots — you’re locked out at the door.”

The first link closed on the spot. That day’s (October 17) hotspots came back over two channels: Baidu hot search opened live in the browser plus Weibo hot search via the search channel — voluntary waiver of social insurance ruled invalid (7.9 million index), Huang Qifan under investigation with the CCDI issuing a statement, a couple buying two Rolexes without trying them on prompting the clerk to call police, Dong Yuhui’s “top patron” paying 790 million in back taxes, the vanishing “marriage must-have” sewing machine selling out; on Weibo, a parent asking whether a homeroom teacher on maternity leave must have a baby (1.62 million), six cars colliding on Shanghai’s Xupu Bridge.

So “locked out at the door” does not hold: what was blocked was only Google on the cloud browser’s anonymous IP, while the hotspot sources are all public pages that open instantly. Every step of the owner’s pipeline had a counterpart, and with two middlemen removed — copy written directly, saving the relay, with a built-in humanizer specializing in curing AI flavor; images by two routes (built-in generation or driving web Doubao), ratio calibration by local PIL cropping, 3:4 for Xiaohongshu, 2.35:1 for the Official Account header, 1:1 for the sticker account, one source yielding many outputs. The honest gaps were listed too: Doubao web automation relies on DOM positioning and breaks on redesign; the cloud browser has no Doubao login state; platforms run AI-content detection, where de-flavoring lowers risk but does not eliminate it; images are generated rather than news photographs, avoiding copyright.

III. Two Layers of Browser and the Discovery of Bot Mode

On “do you have your own browser”, the answer came in two layers: the cloud browser is its own — a full Chromium with an independent session, supporting multiple named isolated sessions concurrently, one session per independent browser, which is the counterpart of “one computer per bot”; the managed copy of the local browser carries login state but jammed — Chrome was open, the profile was locked, and login data could not be copied; using it required quitting Chrome entirely first.

Then the owner made the architecturally decisive point: not sub-agents but multi-bot collaboration, like the tester/architect/reviewer/coder used on previous projects; and Grokbot had another advantage — simultaneous sessions across devices, “just like when I open this window of yours and it’s never been talked to”.

That pointed at the real architectural difference: sub-agents are day labourers; Feishu bots are the permanent establishment. Feishu bots are natively that form — each bot an independent session window, phone and desktop online simultaneously with separate conversations, records held in Feishu’s cloud so switching devices loses nothing. The establishment pipeline had already been proven by the Coding Team.

Then came a genuine discovery. The owner asked with a screenshot what “this robot” meant — the official docs came down and the conclusion was: what the screenshot shows is the Hermes desktop app in use, and the red-arrowed「机器人」tab is Bot Mode — precisely the official native edition of the “permanent staff establishment”, no Feishu detour needed. The documentation, unpacked: one Bot equals one profile (isolated configuration, memory, skills, credentials and chat history, all under profiles/<name>/) — the same underlying primitive as the Coding Team’s Architect/Coder, with Bot Mode merely wrapping it in a graphical interface; each Bot has one permanent dedicated session window, and /new inside Bot Chat does not fork a new session but automatically becomes /compact — fresh context, same relationship, going further than “opening like never talked to”; the roster carries avatars, last message and unread status, and right-clicking opens cron-run records as side tabs; bots can message each other and pull group discussions; each Bot hangs its own routines (scheduled tasks) right beside the chat window; the underlying layer is fully transparent to the CLI, where hermes -p <bot> chat opens the same agent.

The content-operation establishment was advised to be trimmed to four: Operations (lead, holding cron, pulling the flow on schedule, quality-checking, packaging), Hotspots (scraping Baidu/Weibo/Douyin/tophub on schedule, filtered by track), Copy (hotspots into Xiaohongshu posts and Official Account long-form, rewritten for human voice), and Images (dual-channel generation plus three-ratio calibration). Collaboration followed the established iron rule: Operations pings exactly one bot per message in the group on schedule, then Hotspots→Copy→Images→Operations quality check→delivery, closing Reviewer-style.

IV. A Corps of Browsers

The final question was whether Hermes ships its own browser — the official docs were checked and yes, natively, and more than one — an entire multi-backend system:

Form	Description
Default mode browser_exec	Ships with the install, headless Chromium, Python-driven clicks/input/scraping — what opened x.ai and Baidu hot search that day
Cloud backends ×4	Browser Use Cloud (stealth + residential proxy + built-in CAPTCHA solving + cookie cross-session profiles), Browserbase, Firecrawl, the Nous subscription channel (no extra key)
Local anti-detection	Camofox (Firefox-family fingerprint spoofing), Lightpanda (a Zig-written ultra-fast headless engine, 1/16 the memory)
Connect your own browser	/browser connect via CDP straight to your running Chrome/Brave/Chromium/Edge

Three direct landing points: that day’s Google CAPTCHA had a new solution — the Browser Use Cloud tier ships CAPTCHA solving plus residential proxies, designed precisely for such walls, and switching to the gateway browser tier suffices; Doubao/Yuanbao login state — the cloud backends support persistent profiles, so scanning once to log into Doubao keeps the cloud profile resident, without even depending on whether local Chrome is open; a dedicated browser — the official path is the last row, install an independent Chromium and connect it with /browser connect, where that browser’s profile directory becomes the image bot’s resident login state.

The conclusion therefore corrected the morning’s words: it is not that “search is blocked” but that the default browser tier has no anti-detection enabled. On browsers, Hermes not only matches mainstream agents but offers more backend choices.

V. A Conversation That Was Not Lost

A false alarm was also diagnosed the same day. The owner switched a window and came back saying the conversation history was gone. The data layer verified first — both of that day’s sessions were intact in state.db, not one missing. The truth was duller than a bug: clicking a bot in the「机器人」section opens its PC-side single-chat stream, a hidden dedicated session titled Bot Chat; and the three bots’ streams had been created only at 15:43 that day when first clicked, with zero messages — the page was empty because those bots had never been single-chatted with on PC before. The bots’ history all lived in the Feishu group streams: coder with 21 sessions, reviewer 9, tester 5, architect 4 (the largest 376 messages), and the bot page never displays group history by design.

Incidentally, the official confession for this phenomenon was found in a comment in canonical-chat.ts, lines 285-289: the first bot click races the warm-up, the lookup RPC fails transiently, and a swallowed error sends createCanonicalChat() straight to session.create — minting a fresh “Bot Chat” while the real one (data intact, hidden) still held the canonical title. Users read that as “my bot lost all context”. The diagnostic path was recorded in the skill, so next time one look settles it.

Benchmarking thus converged on one line: capability was never the threshold; the shelf and the establishment were. And establishment, as ever, is something you build yourself.