Part three. You built a Site Pulse Bot (Tip #64). You vetted a couple of other people's templates (Tip #71). Now you have a Bot that does a real job well, and you want to hand it to your team or your clients without rebuilding it five times.
That is what templates are for. Here is how Cartoon Nick does it, and the checklist that keeps you from sharing your API keys with the internet.
AI at Work Tip #81: Graduate a Bot before you template it
xAI's own guidance describes the progression: one-time task, corrected process, saved skill, tested routine. A template should only be made from a Bot that has completed that whole ladder. If you template a Bot after one lucky run, you are shipping your luck.
The Bot Cartoon Nick templates most is a solo-owner coordinator. Not the "runs your whole business" kind. The kind that reads and drafts, then hands you decisions:
NAME: Front Desk
TITLE: Daily coordinator for [business name]
ROLE: Each weekday at 6:30 AM Pacific, read new email and calendar for the day. Produce one brief: (1) items that need my reply today, with a drafted reply saved to /workspace/drafts/, (2) today's appointments with one line of prep each, (3) anything mentioning a deadline, refund, complaint, or invoice, flagged at the top. If nothing needs me, send a one-line "nothing urgent."
SKILLS: reply-drafting (match the voice samples in /workspace/voice/), meeting-prep.
RULES: Draft only. Never send, schedule, cancel, pay, or delete. Ask before contacting anyone new.Run it for two weeks. Correct it. Save the corrections as skills. Then template.
AI at Work Tip #82: The strip-before-share checklist
When you choose Share as template, Grok Bot prepares a draft from your configuration, but it does not remove secrets for you. Before you publish, go field by field:
BEFORE SHARING A GROK BOT TEMPLATE
- Remove every API key, password, internal URL, and account ID from every field
- Remove customer names, client data, and anything from a real conversation
- Replace your business specifics with [brackets] the recipient fills in
- Write setup notes: which plugins to connect, which folders to create, which files (voice samples, price list) to add
- Note anything that cannot travel: custom MCP servers, scripts, local files
- Publish to your team first. Public only after a teammate installs it cleanlyRecipients get an independent Bot, not a link to yours. They cannot redistribute without permission. But once you publish public, assume every word is public.
What's hot right now
The templates getting real traction are not the flashy ones. They are single-job Bots with boring names that share on-disk state files and follow the "if nothing, send nothing" rule. The engineering-team rosters (four Bots, each with one lane) are worth studying even if you never write code, because the principle is the same: a Bot that fixes its own findings stops reporting them.
Where your web guy fits in
I am building a small library of read-only Bot templates for clients: site pulse, review monitor, content calendar drafter. They ship with care plans as a bonus, because a client who gets a daily report about their site is a client who understands what the care plan does. If that sounds useful for your business, it lives at webguynick.com.
Frequently asked questions
How do I share a Grok Bot as a template?
In the Bot's settings choose Share as template, review what is included, strip any secrets, and publish to your team or publicly.
What transfers in a Grok Bot template?
Instructions, skills, routines, and selected memories. Logins, conversation history, and custom connections do not.
