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Elon makes vibe coding way cheaper

Elon makes vibe coding way cheaper

xAI wants to win this race...

September 24, 2025

If you’re at all interested in vibe coding, you should be singing Elon’s praises right now.

Last week, xAI (Elon’s AI company) announced Grok 4 Fast.

A lighter and quicker-to-respond version of Grok designed specifically for coding.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because according to people in the know, it’s orders of magnitude (up to 25x) cheaper than the industry’s leading AI-coding solution: Claude Opus 4.

To put that in perspective, imagine having an employee who costs $100,000 per year. Now imagine replacing them with someone just as good for just $4,000 per year.

It’s an industry-rattling development that has implications for corporations, programmers, and even you and me.

On the corporate side, companies that encourage their developers to use AI could see a dramatic reduction in costs (assuming they make the shift to Grok 4 Fast).

If you’re unfamiliar with the space, power users who code with AI can rack up four-figure bills every single month. Spread out over a year, that’s tens of thousands of dollars in expenses in addition to that person’s salary.

On the flip side, Grok 4 Fast could reduce that amount to less than $1,000/year.

And that savings isn’t limited to big companies.

As you can see from the image above, solo/freelance programmers can still rack up 3-4 figure bills writing code for themselves/their clients.

But if Grok 4 Fast can slash that bill to less than $50 per month, most programmers will jump ship even if the quality of the code itself is slightly worse (relative to alternatives).

What interests me the most, however, is how this benefits us.

There are two main use cases for AI-coding if you’re not a techie:

Vibe coding
Building automations with AI-generated code

One of the biggest problems with vibe coding is that - despite the technology being decent - it's nowhere near “great" (with regards to the quality of code it produces).

And because of that, getting your vibe-coded software to the point it’s usable can require a ton of (highly frustrating) back and forth.

To make matters worse, every message you send costs money.

And if you’re working with Claude (which 99% of vibe coders are), you could end up paying a substantial amount for all that back and forth.

But if Grok 4 Fast slashes the cost of producing AI-generated code by 96%, that also means it slashes the cost of vibe coding apps by an equal amount.

Which makes it dramatically cheaper for people who don’t have a technical background to vibe code their apps to perfection.

Second, Grok 4 Fast could be the first ever AI capable of writing automations from zero.

As is stands now, the reason today's AIs are incapable of doing this - despite having the intelligence required - has to do with context windows.

If you’re unfamiliar, context windows can be thought of like the short-term memory/RAM on your computer.

They’re the amount of text the AI can remember and acknowledge before the text becomes so long it’s too much to process all at once.

As it relates to writing automations with the help of AI, a full-blown automation can require thousands of lines of code.

To write thousands of lines of code perfectly, the AI needs to hold your text prompt in its memory, fully map out the automation from A to Z, and then write every character of the JSON without a single mistake.

Up through now, today's AI just haven't had that much memory.

Grok 4 Fast, however, has a massive 2M parameter one.

Meaning, Grok 4 Fast is quite possibly the first ever AI that has a context window large enough to write perfect automations from A-to-Z.

Which would make building automations easier, faster, and more accessible.

In conclusion, Grok 4 Fast is a revolutionary development that only the most nerdy power users are talking about.

But if you're at all interested in building automations or vibe coding, it's possible we’ll look back and realize this was the biggest announcement of 2025.

*Interested in learning more about vibe coding and automations?

Make sure to follow me, Sentient’s Head of Product on X…

And join Sentient’s brand-new AI Power Users community (it’s free : )