Grok 4.6 is FINALLY GOOD! (Real Tests and Review)
Grok 4.6 is finally a real coding model. Not just passable, but up there with Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on overall intelligence. That is a big shift from Grok 4.5, which was fast and fine for quick agent tasks but not something you would trust for long coding sessions. The new version shares the same base model as 4.5, but the post-training work and behavioral tweaks made it much more coherent for long-horizon coding.
The real proof came from our benchmark suite on superbash.ai. We gave Grok 4.6 one massive prompt: build all 16 projects using sub-agents. That is a huge scope for a single shot, and it only used about 40% of the weekly usage limit. For comparison, running the same test on Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol would likely blow through the whole limit. The cost-to-output ratio is easily the best part of this release.
The Helm's Deep moment
The standout result was Helm's Deep. No other model, including Fable 5, has captured the torch details, rain, and lighting that well. It looked like the actual siege. That alone was the most impressive run we have seen. The attention to detail was genuinely strong.
The other 15 runs
Here is the catch. Most of the other projects were average, and some were fails. The petri dish predator vs prey simulation was backwards: prey kept beating predators every time, even when we added more predators. The office life simulation had workers running straight through tables, a pathfinding issue no model has solved yet. Jabberwock would not even load because the game needed WebGL and Grok 4.6 flagged the limitation correctly but still failed the run.
A few other results were mixed. The city scroll landing page worked, but the animation skipped ahead instead of flying through the scene like Quen 3.8 Max does. The low poly tower defense had decent graphics but broken pathfinding and unclear end goals. The mechanical watch simulator was pretty but just showed the inside of a watch with no finished product. Starfall Arena was playable but way too simple.
The universe simulator was a pleasant surprise, with a more accurate sense of scale than other models. The Chinese architecture roof was a pass: no sticks poking out, though the age erosion looked more like mold than cracks. Vice City had nice day/night toggles, and the trebuchet simulator got the physics right but the UI was stuck in the corner. Grok 4.6 essentially front-loaded its best work on Helm's Deep and then drifted off for the rest.
What this means for you
If you need one great deliverable, Grok 4.6 can hit that. If you need 16 solid deliverables from one prompt, expect maybe three or four great ones and a lot of mediocre output. We suspect running each benchmark in its own session, with Grok 4.6 doing its own coding instead of orchestrating sub-agents, would produce much better results. We plan to test that next.
The practical call: use Grok 4.6 for long coding tasks where you can review and iterate on one project at a time. The price-to-value is hard to beat, and for the first time, Grok is a solid first pick for coding. Just do not expect uniform quality across a huge batch job.