Video and Animation — Grok
Grok is the toy in the kit, and I mean that as a compliment. When I want a short video or a loose animation to make a point land, I open Grok and let its image-and-video side, Grok Imagine, do the work; the current video model arrived in mid-2026.
It’s the one tool I use for fun first, work second. Treat it as a sketchbook for motion, not a render farm.
Treat it as a sketchbook for motion, not a render farm.
Keep the prompt short and aimed at the motion, generate a pile of cheap variations, and keep the one in twenty that surprises you. Don’t fight it for frame-perfect control — that’s a different tool and a different budget. The value is how little it costs to try something dumb and find out it’s good.
In practice
- Spinning up a short concept clip to make a point move instead of sit still.
- Generating loose variations and keeping the one that surprises me.
- Quick, playful motion experiments that never need to be polished.
What I used in 2025
What I don’t use
- Pika — more powerful, but overkill for the throwaway clips I make.
The Routing Is the Skill
If your edge is knowing the current stack, your edge has a short shelf life.
So here’s the method I promised, the part that outlives any name on this list. Forget the tools for a second and look at your work. Break it into actual jobs — reading, drafting, building, deciding — because the unit that matters isn’t “do my work with AI,” it’s the specific job in front of you.
Ask three things of each job.
- What is it, exactly?
- Which tool was built for that intent — whose ideal user has this exact problem?
- And where does that tool break, so you find out before you commit instead of after?
That’s also why “just use one model” fails as an objection. One tool can do every job passably, and passable is the most expensive option there is — it’s the rework, the bland draft, the prototype you rebuild.
The cost of switching is small and visible; the cost of forcing the wrong tool is large and hidden. The designers who survived the jump from paste-up to desktop publishing understood this — they weren’t loyal to a tool, they understood the work the tool stood in for.
So don’t audit your tools. Audit your jobs. Find the one where you’re settling for passable because switching feels like a hassle, and switch. The stack will keep changing under you — but decomposing the work and matching each piece to its tool is the habit that compounds.