Comment by iJohnDoe

1 day ago

Probably off-topic. Astra has been kind of weird. Like, I can't trust it, weird. It has an interesting tone, especially in Codex, that is off-putting. It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. If OpenAI was chasing Claude's approach, then they are going in the wrong direction. OpenAI has always been the "business and boring approach", which was its selling point and why I have stuck with it. Claude was always the radical one (powerful, but radical).

Also, Astra overlooked, in my opinion, a serious flaw in its approach for something I was working on recently, which really surprised me.

Reading between the lines, there were some breakthroughs with Astra, which I'm sure is why OpenAI released it so quickly after Sol, but probably not in the ways the traditional OpenAI customer wanted.

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iJohnDoe

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redox99  17 hours ago

Astra is definitely weird. It is more capable than Sol, no doubt about that. There are things sol could simply not solve that Astra breezes through.

However for typical low to medium difficulty code, it will often either overengineer stuff, create massive functions instead of organized code, and just write very hard to read code. It literally looks like minified code. Clearly they trained it to reduce the number of output tokens and in turn the code is often atrocious. I'll keep trying Astra but I might actually go back to 5.6 sol for many tasks if I keep getting these results.

enraged_camel  1 day ago

>> It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do.

I gave Astra a pretty straightforward bug ticket yesterday. The bug involved an edge case that could sometimes result in an invalid value getting stored in a user profile field. Pretty harmless, no crash or anything, just annoying.

Based on past experience, I don't trust OpenAI, so I decided to watch Astra as it worked. About four minutes in, it convinced itself that it should also check the prod database to see "how far the corruption has spread" and attempted to SSH into the hosting provider. This resulted in my 1Password to prompt me, which I of course denied. Then I stopped Astra, closed the ChatGPT/Codex app and gave the task to Opus 5. Suffice it to say I will not be renewing my subscription, because "you have to watch it like a hawk" is the opposite of agentic engineering.

  • wilj  21 hours ago

    ChatGPT desktop this morning lost a chat thread while I was actively working in it. I asked Astra to find the lost session, and next thing I know it's prompting for full computer control to drive Finder. It's just jsonl files on disk, not hard to read normally.

    Negative feedback filed and ChatGPT uninstalled.

  • AnimalMuppet  20 hours ago

    You have to watch it like a hawk so it doesn't do something to production, on its own, without a specific request? Wow. Then I could never trust it to not be doing something to some other system that it shouldn't, so I'd have to audit every network request.

    If enraged_camel had been doing something else involving the production database at the wrong time, they might have accepted the 1Password prompt.

    • enraged_camel  12 hours ago

      Worth noting that this has never, ever happened with Anthropic models, which I've been using all day every day since Opus 4.1.

ModernMech  1 day ago

I don't really like Astra either. It doesn't seem noticeably better than Sol, and it uses more tokens. Some people said ultimately it's cheaper because it can solve problems faster but I haven't really noticed that.

The way I use it now is I'll ask a chat 6 Pro session to make a plan and then have Sol implement it, then 6 Pro reviews it. This seems fine and it doesn't use my Codex minutes, so I'll use Astra. But on the metered tasks I don't see the utility.

This is a problem for OpenAI because if Sol is good enough, and they don't have a moat, then it's only a matter of time before Sol-level models are open sourced and running locally. I know I'll be doing that as soon as I can.

  • BikiniPrince  1 day ago

    I'm still working through my first few days, but I've had to deal with Opus ADHD for a while. I built a task management system which is closer to old school remedy with reviewers. The stylistic guidelines on task creation have a seven part problem statement, goal, success, ancillary data and such. By framing the task diligently it does keep the work on target. The review logic is basked into the task management software so the agent can't declare done. On open ended issues it can still wander. It's been remarkable to drive down issues over these last few weeks. I was annoyed I had to stop for 3 days and build management infrastructure, but it's paid for itself.

  • zamadatix  1 day ago

    I had a few problems which Sol was bumbling around with and giving mediocre results (e.g. in a toy planet app, Sol was taking several iterations to get a half decent looking render of the weather I still wasn't pleased with) but Astra managed to implement well in one go.

    Much the same as you're saying, I never got around to verifying how much of that was because of Astra being better vs just being a different model sent specifically to those tasks because the token usage didn't make sense to spend unless it was something not working in Sol. So even if it was all due to Astra being fantastic I'd still not like to use the model for the cost being even more fantastic.

  • redhed  1 day ago

    I have tested it out with CAD and PCB circuits and it is a huge jump compared to Sol. I agree though when trying it with programming I don't notice a huge jump.

    • kilpikaarna  21 hours ago

      Anecdotally (I did try it myself, but wasn’t blown away) many seem to like it for 3D modelling. That was emphasized in the promo too. I think this kind of ”general intelligence” is what is meant to set it apart from 5.6.

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