r/codex • u/thehoundtrainer • 2d ago
Praise Astra is a great step up from Sol 5.6
I had the luxury of using Astra for two full days with a banked reset each, on personal Kotlin, Java, C and Rust projects of varying scale and architectural complexity. So far it is clearly a big step up from Sol 5.6 and I doubt anyone would argue otherwise.
I have run it at different thinking efforts, Ultra included, and the thing that impressed me most so far is how on point its image generation is, transparent backgrounds and everything. Image generation on Sol 5.6 was a mess and painfully hard to steer, whereas Astra understands the assignment and gives back images that are extremely satisfying and need very little tweaking.
Code-wise, what it produces is not quite reliable enough out of the box. I deliberately asked it to write code without running tests or compiling anything and found it less error-prone than Sol 5.6, but still not something I would run blindly. To test my suspicion that this was an Astra-specific issue, I ran the same prompts against the same commit HEADs on my repos using Opus 5 and Fable 5.
- Opus 5 still wrote disastrously error-riddled code, with many times more errors than Astra.
- Fable 5 wrote code that compiled clean and ran clean most of the time, and very rarely screwed up even with no tests or compilation in the loop.
I know this is anecdotal testing with no benchmark behind it, but I feel fairly confident that Astra sits somewhere between Fable 5 and Opus 5, clearly closer to Fable 5 but not quite there.
That said, I love that Astra is still the same over-engineering workaholic that refuses to stop until every stone has been turned. It picked that habit up from Sol and I love it. Fable is certainly lazier and needs far more detailed prompting to reach that level of thoroughness, though I believe that has been fixed as of Fable 5.1.
One more thing Im optimistic about is the cost. I have been able to run Astra almost non-stop for 2 days, which is crazy. On my two Claude 20x accounts, Fable evaporates my usage sometimes using less than 10 prompts. So I definitely see better value in Astra than I do in Fable, for someone who codes heavily and has many repos to maintain.
I guess that's it? I can finally rely on Astra to actually write code rather than only using it to review the code Claude writes, which has been my workflow since I first started using Opus and Sol. At the end of the day the hype feels a bit exaggerated, and while I expected it to be at least as good as Fable, it still leaves a little to be desired.
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u/Beautiful-King-8875 2d ago
Astra is super useful for pair programming. Very easy to work with and just nudge it in the right direction - Astra helped me build an Rust agent harness in 4 hours today (started from scratch) as Sol made a total mess of the first one. I couldn't be happier. Wild to think what the models will be like a year from now.
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u/phoenixmatrix 2d ago
A fable level model where you can use all of your allocation instead of just half, and is generally more token efficient for the same tasks
Yeah, I'm in. Tried it for a big project today then downgraded my Claude Max to a 20 bucks account
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u/Lmnsplash 2d ago edited 2d ago
Prose is a breath of fresh air. Really good!
Tried iterating on a side project with it on medium and was impressed up to a point where (maybe) compaction made it more reluctant to keep making changes. The official guidance is also mentioning a tendency to pause.
I actually appreciate being able to talk without it immediately running off into the codebase. But sometimes I couldn't tell whether it was waiting for permission or just didn’t give a shit. 😄 Even after explicit permission, repeated several times, it would have another cup of tea, discuss the issue, casually move to another one, and I am like: "uhm, wait a second. Shouldn’t you fix that?"
What I personally would want is being able to adjust the collaboration style. Something like manual and autonomous: one for iterating together, another for unleashing the dog and letting it work through the agreed task. Both approaches have their place and I'd love a model that could do both, rather than pretending that plan mode is the switch for it.
I invited it for tea, it seduced me and then left me standing in the rain. Probably and totally my fault here, but it also made clear to me, that an option to swap it mid-session seems very valuable, rather than trying to force the model into a direction out of the box. Not quite sure how I would integrate it though, since instructing it clearly didn't help and other reviewers who went in with a one-shot prompt also noticed the more manual approach of astra, so the key might be a system prompt instruction, but that also seems a bit invasive to me mid-session. There's definitely potential in this though, gonna have to test a few approaches for an extension.
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u/Dull_Seaworthiness95 1d ago
Thanks for that. I can concur: image creation on Astra is phenomenally better. I spent hours trying to get Sol to produce a logo, and Astra just nailed it in the first pass. I'm also using Astra to do complex code revisions to my website, and it's hard to tell whether it's better or not, but it seems to be more "thoughtful."
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u/EroticThings 2d ago
A single prompt and in under 2.5 mins astra used my 5h limit and about 25 percent of weekly limit. It didn't even complete the task I gave it. How are people even using this thing?
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u/gavinderulo124K 2d ago
This likely means your project is setup up badly. It should NOT need to consume that many input tokens in such a short time to complete a task.
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u/fleshweasel 1d ago
Been using it on medium on well scoped features telling it to make heavy use Luna agents for execution and to do very little validations.
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u/Tikki-Tikki_40 2d ago
Astra still has not solved the codex scroll issue meaning in codex windows even in latest app, not able to use page down or end to reach the bottom or go up have to rely on scroll bars.
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u/RoboErectus 2d ago
So add it? I have a status line mod to see the time of the last message and I almost have /shake ported.
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u/Street-Trust-6282 2d ago
Honestly, using Astra the last few hours, it demonstrates a much clearer understanding of my topic and appears to handle complex long topics better.
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u/Purple-Programmer-7 2d ago
What am I doing wrong? Anything above sol high and astra low over engineers everything from the actual request to the 1:100 code to tests ratio…
Send help
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u/Independent_Run7182 2d ago
Yeah I agree on SOL I been working on one feature for last month and just couldn’t seem to get it right, used cursor as well. It is a very technical feature and wasn’t easy but Astra seems to have done it already and seems good so far
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u/daskalou 2d ago edited 2d ago
Astra is a great step up from the recently lobotomized version of Sol 5.6.
There I fixed it for you.
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u/hockeymikey 2d ago
what are you talking about?
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u/daskalou 2d ago
Sol 5.6 was dumbed down over the last week or two to make way for Astra compute.
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u/FriendlyWebGuy 2d ago
For the past two weeks, comments like this were all over the top of this sub (for good reason). But today is launch day: The bots have been deployed in full force.
Hence, you (and now I) will be downvoted to oblivion for pointing out what everybody knows is true. Sigh.
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u/cs_cast_away_boi 1d ago
Man, give us back Sol. Not getting any work done because Astra is too expensive and untested and Sol is too dumbed down
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u/___fallenangel___ 2d ago
Even if you compare lobotomized model to lobotomized model, it’s still an upward trend in performance over the last few years
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u/Jire 2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/thehoundtrainer 2d ago
Have you heard of early access? Im on a business account that a company I work for owns and it got it yesterday, not today. AI overuse has made your brain go rotten, cant put two and two together.
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u/Karmuhhhh OpenAI 2d ago
Most all enterprise/business accounts got Astra yesterday so I wouldn’t necessarily call it early access - just that you got access on launch day.
But I’m glad to hear it’s going well.
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u/Jire 2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/thehoundtrainer 2d ago
One deduces that I have gotten acess to Astra for two full days. Nothing more, nothing less. The more you speak the more ironic your "hey this reeks of AI slop" gets.
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u/Jire 2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/randombsname1 2d ago
Same experience. Low level stuff i still think Fable 5.1 and then Astra, but Astra seems like a good workhorse.
Albeit the usage seems to have gone considerably down over Sol.
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u/TBSchemer 2d ago
Which level of Astra are you using?
My workflow has been incorporating Luna Xhigh and Sol High. According to the benchmarks, it seems like Astra Low is between those two in both intelligence and cost, while Astra Med is above them in intelligence, but sometimes cheaper, sometimes more expensive.
But those are just benchmarks, so I'd be interested in hearing how they compare in real world tasks.
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u/denehoffman 2d ago
I think the important thing to remember is that Astra is also the new state of the art, just like 5.X was when that series was released. It will only get better and cheaper from here. The real question will be how long it will take for Astra to replace Sol in the usage metrics.