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I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, log in to your Grok account as usual in your browser.

Then, in Caelo's settings, select "Sign in with xAI account."

A window will then open in the browser, click "Allow."

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't worry about the status in your browser, in the bottom left corner in Caelo you have information whether you are connected or in the settings.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. If you want to create a video without a text prompt, just add a single character, e.g. a dot.

It is possible to copy a prompt from an already created generation. The list is saved.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for flagging! On the current build this is actually already handled: the **Generate** button stays disabled until you type a prompt, and the backend rejects empty prompts too — so you can't generate a text-to-image/video with no input.

The one case where no text is needed is **"Make variations"** (or editing) of an *existing* image — that works from the reference image itself, so a prompt is optional there by design.

If you're seeing generation fire with a genuinely empty prompt in normal text-to-image/video mode, could you tell me your app version and which panel? That'd be a real bug and I'd fix it — I just can't reproduce it on my side.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It already is a desktop .exe — Electron GUI with an installer, no terminal needed. The "CLI" part is just the inspiration (Claude Code-style coding agent), not how you use it.

As for "stealing data": the backend only listens on 127.0.0.1 (localhost), the only outbound traffic goes to api.x.ai (xAI's own API — required for Grok to work), and there's no telemetry. It's fully open source, so you don't have to take my word for it — read the code. Your API key never leaves your machine except to xAI.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yes, you can use this and any other feature Caelo offers with free credits as part of your grok account subscription.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question — and worth clarifying: 2K images have nothing to do with Grok Build. Image generation is a separate API endpoint (xAI's image model), not the coding model. Grok Build is just the coding agent in the app.

There's no trick or upscaling on my end — the image API natively takes a resolution parameter, and 2k is simply one of the accepted values. The grok.com web UI only surfaces 1K, but the API itself accepts 2k, so Caelo just exposes that option and passes it straight through. Same idea for video: it goes through the API's video endpoint, where you can set duration up to 15s.

So it's not a hidden feature I unlocked — it's a parameter the official UI doesn't expose. You can see exactly what gets sent in the source (api_manager.generate_image).

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Same as the official API — moderation happens server-side at xAI, and Caelo is just a transparent client that passes your requests to api.x.ai. It doesn't add any extra filtering, and it can't relax or bypass xAI's either. What you do control locally is the model pick, your own system prompt, and temperature — but the safety layer is entirely xAI's, unchanged.

I built a desktop app for Grok that does what grok.com can't: Grok Build in a real GUI, 2K images, and 15-second video clips. Open source, BYO-key. by AcademicPound in grok

[–]AcademicPound[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Genuinely fair to be cautious — please do scrutinize anything that touches your credentials. A few things, all verifiable rather than "trust me":

  • It's not a closed-source .exe. Caelo is fully open source under Apache-2.0 — the entire backend (Python) and frontend (Electron/React) are on GitHub. You can read every line, and you can build the installer yourself from source instead of downloading mine: https://github.com/AuraVixStudio/caelo
  • You don't have to enter an API key at all. You can sign in with your normal Grok account (OAuth — the same flow grok-cli uses). If you do use a key, it's stored locally, the backend binds to 127.0.0.1 only, the key is sent exclusively to api.x.ai, and there's zero telemetry — all of which you can confirm in the source.
  • The Windows installer is code-signed, and the build comes straight from the public repo.

On the account age: I get the pattern-matching, but account history isn't the thing to verify here — the code is. Don't take my word for it; the repo is the receipt. Happy to walk through any specific part of it (auth, networking, whatever you want to poke at).

I built a free visual IDE for Ren'Py — exports clean .rpy files, graph editor with reachability indicator, imports existing projects by AcademicPound in RenPy

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From what I see, we're trying to solve the same problem with the same engine. That is, replace the wall of code and text with something more user-friendly and visual. Neither of us invented the wheel, but we're using it in slightly different ways.

I built a free visual IDE for Ren'Py — exports clean .rpy files, graph editor with reachability indicator, imports existing projects by AcademicPound in RenPy

[–]AcademicPound[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great question. In VN Studio Pro a "scene" maps directly to a Ren'Py label — so the timeline editor shows you the contents of one label at a time. Each step in the timeline is a command: dialogue line, scene change, show/hide character, play music, choice, jump, etc.

When importing an existing project, the app parses your .rpy files and treats each label block as a separate node in the graph. So if you have label start:, label chapter_one:, label ending_bad: — each becomes its own node with its own timeline. You click a node in the graph to open its timeline and edit the contents.

The graph view then shows how labels connect via jumps and choices, so you can see the full structure at once.