matt palmer (@mattyp)

I used Grok 4.6 to build a 2D agent simulation of The Office. Here are notes and observations on 4.6: It is a huge step up from 4.5 - both in the quality of visual outputs and in the breadth of work: personality, features, and finding usable assets for this project. The editorial content and writing were good - I like the "feel" of this model. One of the biggest wins for 4.6 is speed. The throughput (~80 tok/s) and latency are so good that it feels Composer-adjacent - something @ericzakariasson called out in his writeup. That speed + cost + performance makes for a true "workhorse" model that's practical for both personal and work use. My goal was to simulate The Office through "agents" that behaved like the characters - including all of the neuroticism and idiosyncrasies that made the show so funny. I knew what I wanted artistically - I've built similar 2D apps with pixel art. I asked Grok 4.6 to research psychological modeling, pull character descriptions, find references for the cast, and assemble 2D sprites with the Universal LPC sprite sheet generator and some RPG tilesets I grabbed online. I rattled a brief into the @cursor_ai mobile app late one night at the Cursor office and woke up to an MVP. Then I spent a day or so spamming cloud agents until the simulation worked how I liked. The cool part is that Grok did the simulation, art, and research on its own: - Every couple of minutes, each person scores a few possible actions and picks one. They pathfind around desks, work, grab coffee, talk at the cooler, hide in the annex, or end up in a meeting. - Click someone and you can inspect traits, needs, mood, relationships, and whatever they're doing right now. You can also speed time up, force Michael to call a meeting, or roll a random office event. - Each character has Big Five scores that bias what they tend to do. Needs like work, social, caffeine, status, and comfort rise over time and fall when they do something about them. - Grok reconstructed the layout from Dunderpedia (Office Wiki) and online sources - Michael's office and the conference room on the north glass, Pam at reception, sales and accounting in the bullpen, the annex to the east, restrooms and the warehouse down the stairs. - Grok helped me find a few sprite sheet packs to implement. I was surprised at how accurate some of the character sprites were - from hair color to clothing. The combination of a performant model, cloud workspaces, and high throughput made for a really fun devex - the amazing folks at @cursor_ai and @SpaceXAI make my job easier everyday. A huge shout-out to @_Brian_Zhang, whose Notion hackathon project inspired this exploration.

the @xai team really cooked with Grok Build the most beautiful (and performant) TUI I've seen so far >realtime context view >feels snappy in ghostty >first class worktree support >great resume session flow >robust keyboard shortcuts