First go with Grok Bot. I used it to order the kids’ school meals.

Grok Bot isn’t a chatbot. It’s an agent with its own computer. It opens the same websites you use, signs in, clicks around, and is supposed to come back when the job’s done. I set one up this morning to do the Sunday school meal order and tbf, I may as well have asked my 6 year old. I hope it gets better once it’s running. Here’s what that first session went like. What I was trying to do Each Sunday, log in to SchoolGrid (the parent portal). Show me the menu for the week and ask me what I want to select. I pick a main for each day and Grok Bot place the order. I named the bot School Lunch Order and pointed it at SchoolGrid. It is not intuitive, and its slow You don’t quite know what to do at first. The actual flow is: click the bot’s name in the chat header, open the computer preview, sign in on that screen, hand it back. I asked if it could just use the app on my phone. You cant. It cant use any apps on your phone. There’s no thinking or working icon. When it goes quiet you don’t know if it’s reading the menu, stuck on a popup, or just sat there. In normal Grok or Claude you at least see it generating, or canoodling, or whatever Claude says. Here the work is on another screen. If you’re not watching Agent Computer, silence means nothing. I asked “still there?” more than once. Don’t expect it to be as fast as Grok, Claude, etc. Simple forms take ages. That’s because it’s actually filling the form in like a person, not hitting an API. SchoolGrid hasn’t got one. So a three-day menu takes a long time. When it hands the computer over, you can’t paste a password. It just comes back blank. You can’t delete characters either. I had to ask the bot to clear the box after I made a mistake, then type it in properly. Flitting between Grok Bot and the Passwords app to type character by character was painful. Saving instructions is another one. You drop the method into the bot description, and there’s no clear “saved” confirmation. You dont know if it saved or not. What it did get right Once I was in, it found the right child and school. It spotted the holiday and only asked for the days that school is open. It used the ⓘ next to each meal to pull the fillings SchoolGrid hides on the main tiles. A normal day looks like this once you force it to list everything:

• A set main (roast chicken, fish fingers, veggie grill, whatever’s on)
• Jacket: baked beans / grated cheese / cheese & beans / tuna mayo / plain / vegan cheese / vegan cheese & beans
• Filled roll: tuna mayo / sliced cheese / ham / vegan cheese (no ham on Friday)
• Pasta bar some days, with about seven toppings including “no topping” It worked out that ticking the main isn’t enough. Jacket, sandwich and pasta open a "Select Choice" option. If you miss that part then it doesn't select the meal and the meal is not selected. A chat model would probably just guess that but this thing learned it by clicking. It also ignored a top-up warning (low balance on the account) that wasn’t blocking the order, and it didn’t go near card details. Then it reloaded the page, checked the green ticks, and sent screenshots. The order worked but getting there was hard work. The in-line selection was awkward It kept giving me the options in text format. I wanted to just get given a choice to tap. The choices that it gave me weren't nested and so I could only select the top level, meaning the orders could be placed until I specifically asked it to show me the toppings or fillings etc. If you’re using a bot on any site that’s “pick A, then pick A’s extras”, write that two-step rule into the description on day one. Don’t learn it mid-order because its a pain. If you’re about to set one up Treat the first session as training, not as the job getting done. It will finish. You’ll spend most of the time teaching it how your site works and how you want to be asked. My wife was constantly taking the piss out of me by saying that we could have ordered 100 meals manually by now, but the point is its short term pain for long term gain.

Watch the computer preview the first time. If the chat has gone silent it doesn’t mean its not doing anything. You’ll see why a “simple” form takes minutes: click, wait, popup, ⓘ, pick filling, save day, next day. It's crazy how fast the human brain figures this stuff out and we just take it for granted. Write the “don’t” list while it’s fresh:

• Don’t guess a filling
• Don’t ask one day at a time before showing the week
• Don’t offer only the main names when jacket / roll / pasta have extras
• Don’t enter card details
• Don’t ask for the password in chat The way I did this was by doing one painful pass and then asking it to create me a .md of the things that we learned in the session. I then pasted this into the instructions section. Conclusion By the end of the morning the bot had a written method, a placed order, and a note to check SchoolGrid every Sunday. I picked the meals and it did the clicking. That’s Grok Bot right now. It can work a real web portal end to end. The human job is teaching it the shape of the form and the shape of the conversation. The model can already read an ⓘ page and not invent a filling that isn’t on that day. The product around it (status, the preview keyboard, saving instructions, the intuitive chat interface) still needs work; but it is still early days. If you’re making your first bot, pick one boring recurring job on a site you already hate. Next Sunday should be shorter. This one was the setup.

Success = next Sunday, @Bot notifies me to say "here are the meals for the upcoming week - what would you like to order?" I then make my selection and it places the order.