Skills, routines, and triggers
Grok Bot automates work with three building blocks: a skill is the how, a routine is the when, and a trigger is the what-starts-it.
Before we talk about cost, get the three words straight, because the rest of the course leans on them. Grok Bot's documentation describes them plainly.
A skill is a reusable set of instructions for how to do a task — the steps, the decision rules, the expected output, and the safety boundaries. You build a skill once, from a task you've already done successfully, and it becomes available across your Bots. Think of a skill as the how.
A routine tells one Bot when to run a workflow — on a schedule, or, where supported, after an event. A routine is owned by a single Bot. Think of a routine as the when.
A trigger is the thing that makes a routine start. There are two kinds. A schedule is a clock: "every weekday at 8:00 AM." An event trigger waits to be told: a Slack message or a GitHub notification, through an account integration that has its own connection flow. Think of a trigger as the what-starts-it.
The order the docs recommend is worth memorizing: start with a one-time task, make it reliable, save the method as a skill, and only then automate it with a routine. People get this backwards — they schedule something that has never worked cleanly even once, and then debug it on a timer. Prove the task by hand first. Turn it into a skill. Schedule it last.
One more fact to anchor everything that follows: a single Bot can own up to 50 routines. That sounds like a lot until you realize each one is a standing cost that fires on its own forever. Fifty routines is not a goal to reach; it's a ceiling to stay well under. Most people are better served by a handful of routines they actually trust than by forty they've forgotten.
Here is the mental model for the whole course. A chat is a conversation you're in — it costs you once, when you have it. A routine is a worker you've hired to wake up on a timer and check something, over and over, whether or not there's anything to do. The skill is its job description. The trigger is its alarm clock. And the alarm clock, as the next lesson shows, is the expensive part.
In your own words, write one sentence each for "skill," "routine," and "trigger." Then think of one task you'd want Grok Bot to handle on a timer and name which skill it would need, what would trigger it, and whether a schedule or an event fits better.
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