1,000 ways Grok could have lived on a post. Only a handful are right.

The design space across pattern × copy × color × icon × position is large. This page samples 1,000 stable points from it. Most of them are wrong on purpose. The winners are highlighted. The kills are dimmed. The shipped X pattern is in there. One variant rotates as Today's pick, deterministic by date - so the page is fresh every visit, never random.

Validation, two weeks ago

Nikita Bier posted the new Grok tooltip pattern, and X shipped it: tapping the Grok affordance on a post now opens a tooltip with Summarize this, Is this true?, Explain this, Open in Grok. That is variant 037 in this grid, marked Best in class. This case study was built before that shipped - the convergence isn't a coincidence, it's the same product logic landing in two places at once. Today's pick rotates daily through the remaining 1,000 variants. Today is variant --.

What the grid actually shows.

This isn't decoration. The design space is the argument. Showing the variants I rejected makes the choice I shipped defensible - it lets you see the failure modes I avoided.

Five winners, each representing a different cognitive load level. Twelve hard kills - patterns that broke the brand, broke trust, or broke focus. The remaining 983 are tradeoffs across the design space, sampled deterministically so you see a different cross-section every visit.

Why these five won.

Variant 001, the inline row. One tap, anchored to the post, scrolls away to dismiss. The cheapest possible affordance.
Variant 037, the tooltip menu. The pattern X just shipped. Adds task-specific shortcuts without leaving the post.
Variant 058, the long-press menu. Identical to 037 but triggered by hold. The mobile-native version.
Variant 042, the silent affordance. No affordance at all on posts where Grok has nothing to add ("lol", "gm"). Designing the absence is the move most people miss.
Variant 099, the inline streaming answer. The state after the tap - text streams in, sources fade in, scroll position stays.

The other 95 each broke at least one principle. The kills are the loudest signal in the grid.