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Comment by saejox

6 hours ago

Not even close to astra. Astra is something else. It is expensive, but uses way fewer tokens do my tasks.

xAI missed its chance, Ball is on Anthropic's court.

I tried Astra w/ high reasoning on a design document project and it was horrible. It started duplicating output lines, made document edits without permission, and basically did a poor job writing clear prose. I went back to 5.6-sol and it's great. I'm an OpenAI fanboy and was severely disappointed. I hope Astra is better for coding.

Astra fails in similar ways, and at similar frequency, as GPT 5.6 Sol does. It often goes way out of scope, or just stops prematurely, or tries to find odd and even dangerous workarounds when it gets stuck.

It's phenomenal at computer use and 3D stuff. I've been using it less and less for coding.

  • LLM's introduces problems, and it finds them in its own internal thinking. But instead of actually modifying the previous generated answer to fix the real issue, it adds another layer to deterministically guard around it, greatly expanding the scope of the fix. This scales with effort, and the result is spaghetti and with a side of bugs.

    Best to stick with a high end model + low effort, do a manual pass on high effort and fix the bugs you know are reachable.

  • Same, Astra is extremely RL fried, and nobody is talking about it. I used Astra for a few days on my personal project, and load times went from less than 3 seconds to almost 30 seconds because it kept using the wrong sync primitives and bad architecture overall.

    • Huh, I've had a totally different experience. I've used it extensively, maxing out the 200€ plan on personal projects and it's the best model I've ever used, so easy and pleasant to use. It's great for frontend design and using it in Rust I've had Coming from Opus 5, it's a breath of fresh air.

I don't understand these comments.

The two models are in completely different price tiers. Astra costs 5 times as much.

It seems like all you can judge about cars would be their maximum speed on an oval.

  • If you have a look at their headline benchmark on the post here, Grok 4.7 is hardly cheaper than Fable 5.1 Low and performs similarly.

    Based on Artificial Analysis Cost per Task, Astra is about 2-3x cheaper than Fable 5.1 at Medium and Low.

    Consequently Astra could be cheaper than Grok 4.7, depending on the task.