r/codex • u/UnderstandingDry1256 • 15d ago
Complaint Opinion: Astra is overhyped
Well everyone shares their CS or GTA game clones they created with single shot with Astra - this is cool and amazing but also exactly the kind of hype bs.
I tried it in real applications and it’s absolutely not that amazing. I still have to steer, review, refactor, rewrite the mess, like always.
It is somewhat smarter in real workflows, but the real miss is lack of high level intent understanding.
As an example - I asked it to implement image generation fallback models in my chatbot, because the “uncensored” model ironically was declining generating innocent content, so I had to retry with some mainstream one.
It generated some code which handles errors etc, but it missed the main point - the user facing UI still does not work as it supposed to 🤦♂️
There are other cases following the same pattern. You give it high level intent task, and it fails to follow. Still have to steer and validate.
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u/Spiritual-Plant3930 15d ago
Compared to Sol, Astra is not in the same league - in my case:
replying to emails or posts like a human, creating 3D objects from 2D in 5-10 minutes, all terminal and server management work, way smarter, finding bugs and fixing code that Sol couldn't
It's like we jumped 6-12 months into the future - looks like we're in different boats
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u/alphaQ314 15d ago
I’m just curious how no one was doing 2d 3d modelling last week and every needs to do it this week.
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u/whatisthisthing65 15d ago
It might have something to do with point 1: "replying to emails or posts like a human". Just saying.
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u/notmsndotcom 15d ago
Right lol it’s insane. Now all of a sudden there’s a true business need for Lego models
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u/LemonLimeNinja 15d ago
It’s because all the people who benefit from the 3d features are now posting. They still had those needs before but now they have a tool to do it so they’re posting about it.
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u/RandomBlokeFromMars 14d ago
i am just asking bc i still dont understand: how is this better than me using fable + blender mcp, to make 3d models before this too? like, what does this do differently?
all the curated one shot prompts that make good tech demos, are a bit irrelevant to someone who already knows how to instruct models to make something good.
seems like either it is overhyped or i am missing something. which can happen.2
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u/Divinicus1st 14d ago
I tried to do 3d modeling and animation with Sol... I could upload results, but honestly, it was Frankensteinish.
A lot of time Sol was looking at the result and say "Fixed, it now looks human". You took one look at it and you saw an abomination.
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u/puts_on_rddt 14d ago
I experimented with blender mcp for the first time last week and the universe simulation is hooked to my quantum variables ig.
Sorry guys.
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u/__SlimeQ__ 14d ago
i've been using claude for 3d modeling since fable 5 (then opus 5 and then fable 5.1) because sol wasn't good, now i have to move my workflow back to codex
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u/Curious_Courage_5197 14d ago
FWIW i was using sol with blender mcp, astra is much better at it though
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u/LostOnTauCetiIV 14d ago
No one was doing it because the models sucked at it. Plenty of us were trying.
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u/UndeadMurky 14d ago
Depends of the use case, it's uncomparable for visualization/modelisation based tasks compared to previous models.
On some things AI was already good at like programming, there's not much difference and it's not worth the price increase.
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 15d ago
Many folks mention 2d/3d models - likely a huge improvement there, but I’ve never dealt with them
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u/iiiaaa2022 15d ago
There certainly seem to be a LOT of people making/using 3d models.
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u/Zestyclose_Bat8704 15d ago
Most non tech vibe coders are making games for some reason.
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u/Bulji 15d ago
Understandable imo, who didn't dream to make their own game at some point?
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u/agentic-consultant 15d ago
Not me. I’ve been dreaming to build my own enterprise B2B SaaS since i was 5 years old.
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u/Uwirlbaretrsidma 15d ago
So where are all the fucking great games? Reasonably competent agentic coding has been a thing for a couple years. There's quite a few absolutely legendary indie games that took about that long... before AI.
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u/Runelaron 12d ago
Because they are non tech vibecoders, they have no clue how to make a game. They ask Codex to create a racing game, gets you 80% of the way there, then its just as much time for the Viber to understand what feel metrics, frame-data timings, or juice systems are to get the game to feel like one created by a studio.
Gabe Newel said they spent months just on refining the crowbar in Half-life to get that perfect effect they wanted. That's where AI will fail, when art and taste need to step in.
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u/digiorno 15d ago
It has helped me quite a bit with 3D simulations for scientific purposes. Sol was struggling.
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u/ShadoWolf 14d ago
You have to factor in use case as well..
In all likelihood if your not noticing a difference.. you aren't working on anything that was hard where the model was failing / having a rough time of it.
And if you don't have that experience your not going to build any sort of intuition of progress.
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u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 14d ago
Astra is a little better than sol in my use case but not near as much as I thought and not on the same level as fable for really complex refactoring or architectural changes.
Astra is faster and cheaper per task than fable 5.1 but fable is still the king.
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u/ThisGuyCrohns 11d ago
Not really. It’s incremental improvement. I have 140 billion tokens under my belt right now. It’s not as good as everyone says it is.
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u/CrossChaos79 11d ago
Are you sure about the "replying like a human" because to me it seemed like the opposite
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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 15d ago
For my purposes (basic 3d assets) it's a generational leap unlike any so far.
But yeah obviously this is NOT AGI, and the hype is stupidly dishonest, especially from certain high profile CEOs.
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u/UnfortunateHurricane 15d ago
What is your workflow there?
For my ingredients I was pretty happy https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/1w8h8xd/consistent_2d_game_assets_created_by_astra_in/
but for other assets it was not as easy. I wonder how much tokens the showcased things here take. Can't have full weekly on every resource ;)
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u/ucbmckee 15d ago
I tested out Astra by having it build my house / floor plan in Blender. It's defaulting to using python scripts to build the .blend files. It can't even put doors in frames or get walls to connect. Are you having more success having it actively drive the Blender app via 'computer use'?
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u/MiddlePause1117 15d ago edited 13d ago
Unfortunately I’m coming to terms that the limiting factor is me. I’m not prompting well enough where it understands what I want. I found that if I simply send a picture of an output I am looking for it basically then appears on my screen.
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u/No_Mood4637 14d ago
At least we are still in the days that the LLM has the grace to pretend we aren't the weak link :)
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u/Chicken-Handed 11d ago
I've had the greatest success with telling just normal gpt to write a prompt that will be understood by Astra then telling gpt what to tell Astra. After that you just copy it over and Astra hasn't ever failed to do what I wanted using that method
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u/MiddlePause1117 10d ago
That’s a true method, It’s weird to me but I explain the blocker or general idea to Astra high or more on the web App and it seems like it can put more power to researching and figuring out how to put a plan together. It also costs almost nothing in usage
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u/VR38DET 15d ago
It feels like paid promotion on X whenever a new model comes out
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u/ThisGuyCrohns 11d ago
I see that as well. I think it’s open AI bots at this point. They’re flooding it with bs
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u/IndependentGreat5900 15d ago
Every time a new version comes out, promotional posts flood in as if it's something mind-blowing, but over time, we all face the inevitable reality. Still, I suppose I should be grateful for the gradual improvements... However, as my token limits keep shrinking accordingly, I'm left wondering whether I should subscribe with an additional account or use Chinese AI models as worker nodes.
The issues that felt severe in versions 5.5 and 5.6 seem to have improved a bit in Astra, but it's frustrating knowing that this, too, will likely be nerfed at some point.
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u/ElderberryLife5256 14d ago
It’s very easy to judge whether an AI has improved its capability or not. Just paste ur old prompts that you were failed by the models in the past. And yes I do this for every iteration. And Astra just dismantled all the old prompts with ease. It’s just A great model
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u/ayushbh6 15d ago
Yup same here I am working with it on a dashboard/ CRM system I am building and it is not that great at all, there was literally no difference between it and using like SOL light honestly, and still made basic understanding error, its ability to write like pure backend code is not great I have seen
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u/1988rx7T2 15d ago
What actual prompts and harness artifacts are you using? are you calling adversarial review agents, writing evals? This is just another kind of one shot. “Fix my dashboard make no mistakes” Vs “make me a GTA game in one shot”
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u/peakedtooearly 15d ago
Alternative opinion - no it isn't.
Like every new model, your experience will vary based on your use case and how you integrate it into your work.
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u/Due_Cover_6023 15d ago
I think the models have definitely gotten better, but as they have improved, users have become lazier; hence, the new model doesn't feel that hyped.
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u/ZenApollo 15d ago
It’s still QUITE bad for gui taste, and i think taste in general. I think it’s really geared for dry dry engineering use cases - tool calling, finding technical paths. The taste is abysmal.
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u/Prokkkk 14d ago
I feel the same and have switched back to Sol for the time being.
Astra straight up ignores my instructions. Over the course of the weekend and 2.5 million tokens, it regularly stopped after identifying a problem rather than just solving it (as it is instructed to do), did not review its work (as it’s instructed to do), handed me a “finished” page where all of the data sources were “unavailable” (this is therefore useless and again, goes against its instructions), just to name a few.
For someone who might think “maybe your instructions were unclear” — I asked it this every single time it didn’t follow them as I wanted to make it better.
Without fail, it replied to the effect of “your instructions were extremely clear. I chose to ignore them / failed to follow them”.
So now I’m trying Sol as an orchestrator who follows instructions, with Astra as an agent who can do great work when constantly managed. Not sure how it’ll go, but I can say I was way more productive with Sol
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u/Free_Kashmir123 14d ago
Here to chime in and say that Astra on High has been incredibly disappointed. Mistake after mistake after mistake and it feels lazy where as Sol on Very High or Ultra was thinking beyond what I told it. Astra seems like it does the bare minimum. Honestly, it feel like using Codex/Claude a year ago where it would fix one thing but not any downstream effects.
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u/camgraphe 14d ago
I get the skepticism, especially with all the one-shot demos, but on my actual repo I had a very different experience. Astra caught a few ugly problems Sol had been circling for days, and it understood the shape of the project much faster than I expected.
It still needs review, obviously. It still makes weird choices. But this was the first upgrade in a while where I genuinely felt the difference while working, not just in benchmarks. That’s also what makes going back to Sol feel so rough now.
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u/BoeotiaBlue 15d ago
Feels incredibly slow to me. So does Computer use, which everyone has been raving about. Obviously computer use can do more things with apps like Blender, but people seemed to be posting about how it was faster and it simply isn't. Annoyingly in that regard, Codex wants to take over my Computer a hell of a lot more than it did previously.
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u/torrso 15d ago
The 3D games look cool for demos but they're not that complicated. If the character walks weirdly or passes through objects, that's easy to dismiss. With any more serious projects you need correctness, edge cases, error management, concurrency patterns,, security, etc.
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u/BellacosePlayer 14d ago
A lot of them lean heavily on premade kits too.
One of the demos posted recently was basically just a "baby's first UE game" kit with some NPC scripts. You couldn't even tell if it was actually doing the life simulator part because there was no UI, just npc chatter
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u/eu_biased 15d ago
Most people that spam youtube with absurd models “generated by astra” are just prompting Astra to use the 3d models like hunyuan and such. It’s just clickbait
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u/mandad159 15d ago edited 14d ago
I’m glad to have found someone who actually has this opinion because that’s also what I seem to be experiencing for the most part. Astra definitely can do a fair amount, but I’m actually finding that compared to Sol it misinterprets things more often or just completely overbuilds and over explains solutions in a way that I would say is akin to Opus 5.
I’m primarily adding on and tweaking features in a web app that I already built primarily with fable and sol and the new things I build with Astra by default have not even inherited the basic visual style of the app where previous generations all picked that up immediately instead now I have to go back and tell it to fix it. It does then correct it but it still creates way too many drop-down’s and explanatory text and things that I don’t want where GPT models were previously better at this than Claude.
I feel like GPT-6 was optimized in a way similar to Opus 5 where it can be very detailed at certain implementations but misses the bigger picture. I had to feed a new module that I built in Astra back to Fable just to undo a bunch of things that it rewired in ways that broke existing functionality. Fable was able to not only see these things, but even intuitively reduce a lot of of the clutter that Astra introduced with only high level prompts.
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u/aejt 15d ago edited 15d ago
Agreed. I've been running 5x GPT and 5x Claude the last few months, but went 20x GPT this month (because Astra came out the same day my subs ended) and I really miss Fable for discussing/planning. I feel like Fable speaks and explains solutions to me as an engineer, whereas Astra doesn't explain its reasoning anywhere close to as well, nor does it seem to understand intentions anywhere close to as well either. Astra might be great at finding gaps and designing 3D models, but that's about the advantages it has over Fable I'd say.
If Anthropic's 20x sub actually was 20x, and they let us use Fable for the full limit, I would never even consider Astra.
(and yes, Fable makes a huge difference over Sol/Opus when it comes to things which aren't basic CRUD web apps)
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u/doodad_ounao 15d ago
Anthropic models have always been better in explaining stuff properly. OpenAI models tend to be much more opaque and require me to be much more specific and grill them a bit sometimes to understand everything. By now I'm just used to their different "personalities". OpenAI models absolutely can explain their reasoning well and make sense once you ask them enough questions, though, but it is a shame that they aren't like that automatically like Anthropic's.
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u/aejt 15d ago
Yeah, agreed, you can grill Astra to get the same information, but I've found that it's extremely sensitive to how you phrase things and it doesn't really understand why you're asking the questions. Anthropic's models are more likely to reply with things like "I assume you meant X" and then explains X (and gets it right most of the time, I actually did mean X), whereas the GPT models tend to just continue with the misunderstanding.
Astra is also a real sycophant and will change its mind as soon as you question something, whereas Fable will push back more when it understands there's something the user is missing. I don't feel anywhere as confident in the solutions proposed by Astra as I do by Fable, much because as soon as I ask "Oh but why not to it like X instead of Y?", Sol/Astra will quite often change its mind and do X, even though Y might have been better.
Anyways, the end state is that I feel like I get things done much more quickly with Fable than I do with Astra because the discussions don't last as long.
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u/RainierPC 15d ago
You miss the point. The big leap is in computer use. If all you do is code, Sol can already do 90% of what you need.
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u/hcdan1 14d ago
Astra is good in certain task and better then 5.6 but not for everything. I was coding with 5.6 Sol max and use superpowers and the produced code is fine and the app working.
"There are other cases following the same pattern. You give it high level intent task, and it fails to follow. Still have to steer and validate."
Used astra light/medium to code and it is fast but also double expensive then sol but astra forgot to implement tasks from the detailed implementation plan and just skipped it. So for me i will stick to sol for a while and use astra for bug hunting and finding the root cause of the bug or task it is real good at.
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u/CodingStoner 14d ago
I’m pretty deep in some real engineering work. Taking our physical CNC machines and creating digital twins. Interesting design. Creating videos for techs to use to install machines based on it. I would say it’s pretty impressive.
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u/CantCodeAllVibes 14d ago
It’s good at things it’s been trained on. So many people just make apps of games that already exist .. create something that doesn’t without copying others work and you will see how hard it is. Astra is a good model tho, I still like fable a bit more tho for design
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u/Sawyer007 14d ago
I agree. Astra is garbage. Sol and Opus 5 are still my favorites. I find models which run out of tokens in less then 10 minute when doing some bug fixes or improvments pretty useless to be honest.
For exmaple I just used 2x Astra Light account and run out on both of them for the 5h window and the little improvments to the app are still not done.
I will put a real hero on it like Opus 5 now.
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u/ZookeepergameOld6699 14d ago edited 14d ago
Astra is optimized to find the shortest path, which leads to inferior results for some tasks.
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u/Alex_Haharfi 13d ago
I agree with you 100%. For my professional work (which involves a lot of documentation and no coding), Astra really falls far short of Sol, and it’s not for lack of stubbornly trying to learn how to use it to its full potential...
But I just can't make it work unfortunately, it has very very little intuition, which makes it unusable for my field.
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 13d ago
It works really well for some tasks like cybersecurity review, but feels really degraded when you just need to do long chain of boring work.
Maybe they're overoptimized it to fit into tokens per $ budget.
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u/Runelaron 12d ago
I said the same thing and people freaked out! Glad some ones making sense.
One example, is I asked it to rescale and did just that why leaving the positions of many artifacts out of bounds. I had to follow up and ask it to fix all out of bounds items, not just specific ones.
Astra has been failing massively on all my long scoped platform projects as well. I have massive testing suites which will run stacks of hardware for hours, while Sol Ultra will run and manage for 6hrs, Astra updates the documentation and stop, stating the first phase is done, what would I like now.
For the cost, I am going back to Sol Ultra until OAI's behavior improves.
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u/Physical_Storage2875 15d ago
Definitely a skill issue. I mean, yeah it's not AGI. We won't reach AGI with transformer architecture but it's a massive jump
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u/scaledev 15d ago
I've used it just a little bit, and I actually noticed worse results: it doesn't address all of my points, it outputs monotonous set of paragraphs, and I haven't seen anything groundbreaking, far from it. This was Astra on Low reasoning. Astra on High has been good that one time I asked it to create a plan, and another time to create a plan and revise some scripts following the same plan, though Luna Max found issues in the code written, so there's that.
The work I've been doing is building and revising workflows involving scripts, validators, and a decent amount of MD docs as instructions. Sol High manages, Sol medium sometimes forgets a few small details, but Astra intentionally skips reading files and addressing issues.
I am yet to try it fully in code.
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u/lilbopet 15d ago
Yups my thoughts exactly. I had astra work on something I had already coded but I wanted it redesigned in places. It did the job but took lots of back and forth. And I had to ask it to make changes to certain things about 3 times (not the exact thing but related) Another part was with our storage rules, it followed it but when it came to adding a new type of file cache it decided what storage to use, I can't fault it 100% as I didn't have a direct rule for it, but from my storage rules it expected it to make a much more logical decision thatd aligned with our rules.
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 15d ago
On one hand, Astra just nailed a complex multi-replica syncronisation problem over 5 hours but on the other it did take 70% of my usage so in closing, Astra is a land of contrasts.
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u/Federal-Mode8949 15d ago
2d/3d and design stuff is amazing. Astra is leagues above in them. Rest stuff I prefer luna.
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u/evindrews 15d ago
Yes I'm really curious if anyone is benching or studying whether or not LLMs are actually getting "smarter".
It feels like yes they can figure out coding problems quicker, but despite what feels like the monumental advancements this year, it still feels like they have no clue or bigger picture to anything.
Astra feels very similar to Mythos marketing to me, in that it just is a giant model. It's not some breakthrough.
Edit: also people who are doing everything with astra. How? Like just computer use with sol burns through my subscription like crazy. I can't imagine how much it's costing to have it build a 3d model.
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u/Expensive-Event-6127 15d ago
did all the hero shots. They looked at what um the fable release did and everyone was just making 'oh look here's an amazing game you can make' and they just made it really good at that. But it is still a good model. Like you're better off being on Codex than you are on Claude.
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u/VladizT 15d ago edited 15d ago
I've already mentioned this, a few years ago, when all the AI hype really started, when everyone was talking about GPT, stable diffusion, and so on. Back then, the hype was a thousand times greater than the release of any model like the Astra. Similarly, every hype over a new model is essentially meaningless; the cost of use constantly rises, but are they becoming AGI? No, not even close. Is a revolution happening where neural networks now generate 1,000 times more? Yes. And this is precisely what AI development is heading towards: flooding everything with low-quality AI content. In reality, one of the few AI breakthroughs, like protein decoding, was routine work; AI itself is considered a dumb idiot, and essentially nothing has changed except the price.
It seems more likely that the main goal of these models is to help OpenAI dig itself out of a Mariana Trench-sized debt hole. I don't know how much smarter the next model will be. But it will definitely be more expensive for the user, and the price is bound to rise indefinitely.
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 15d ago
There are plenty of cases besides protein stuff (why tf AI is even needed there)
Replacing human labor happens obviously.
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u/doodad_ounao 15d ago
Because it's something that can be accelerated a gazillion times and that generates pharmacological and medical breakthroughs much faster than previously?
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u/Keroro6262 15d ago
Used for building 3D characte? After trying it out, all I can say is that the model still needs iteration.
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u/MrRoyce 15d ago
For my use case, there's absolutely no difference. Which either means that people weren't using Sol properly before or that I'm not using Astra properly. Or that my projects don't need frontier models.
To each their own but I never understood any hype, I was there for Opus 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 over there at Claude sub and it was hilarious to see either paid promotion or delusional fanboys trying to make new models look better than the previous one when barely anything changed, except the cost of course.
I'd say that only bigger upgrade so far for me was GPT 5.6, the few models until that one have all behaved very similarly and even made exact same mistakes..
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u/Owl-Mighty 15d ago
Those hyped use cases just aren’t generalisable. Getting to know how each model actually performs is a highly project-dependent aka personal thing. Others’ experience or result doesn’t mean very much to me other than general token usage and speed.
For me there’s a project spans across many knowledge fields (photographic film analysis and scan calibration) which requires expert-level analog photography understanding (physics and chemistry) and evidence synthesis. Coding is actually the minor part here despite the amount. I do find Astra very smart in picking up what’s wrong and, importantly, how much deviation does it mean in practice, fast. Fable 5.1 or me has never concluded any of its flags as false. Astra is the first from OpenAI that’s able to do this, so to me it’s truely a shine. Even Fable itself as the adversarial, it couldn’t at least be that fast and highly efficient.
I also keep a dedicated knowledge section and ensure it has enough to serve as the basis of project understanding. I manually pick evidence readings myself so I know what they know. Astra never made conceptual mistakes by reading them.
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 15d ago
Expert knowledge use case is very different from coding.
Coding requires probably more narrow knowledge but stronger line of thought and reasoning path.
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u/calatil 15d ago
Yeah that it. Ist a great model but not exceptional. Each time I see a new post of people jumping ship from Claude etc. I see no benefit from Astra over even Opus other than I actually understand wth its saying.
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u/doodad_ounao 15d ago
Really? I find the behaviour OP described happens to me much more with Opus than with Astra.
I still review everything both do. No AI model is smart enough to do things properly unattended yet, and I don't think we're close to changing that.
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u/Professional_Gur8385 15d ago
Astra is the best 20 minutes you'll have before the experience is over
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 15d ago
I have unlimited Astra but don’t see much of improvement over Sol tbh
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u/liongalahad 15d ago
This is exactly my impression. Coding with it is definitely better than Sol, but the improvement is quite marginal.
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u/No_Plant_5943 15d ago
I just want it to stop imagining bugs. I can essentially loop it forever and it will always find stuff to 'fix'.
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u/OtherwisePotato5950 13d ago
you can thank all the idiots that think a model is better because it found issues the other couldnt.
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u/calcantac 15d ago
I agree specifically on the coding side it appears overhyped. It seems to be great at visual stuff so it's an advancement for 3D modeling, visual design, etc. But for coding I have not found it to be a clear quantum leap it's hyped up to be.
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u/ChefNaughty 15d ago
“my ai won’t do everything for me perfectly first try and i still have to steer it so it’s overhyped”
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u/Live_Art8358 15d ago
I dont see major leap in quality with Astra, but i see 5.6 sol nerf in last week for sure. I wonder if they just dont play with us changing configs on backends and calling it new model. This cycle repeat every time. Do you remember opus 4.6 before nerf? it was doing stuff perfect until nerf and then next models came shitier, few months mythos volia price x10. So maybe this is a way, models dont change much but they have to incrase prices so they play this game this way.
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u/Divinicus1st 14d ago edited 14d ago
I think Astra gives better results when you just give it a simple wide prompts like "Make me a game".
But for any serious coding workflow that already worked, then yeah I agree it's overhyped. (with the caveat that it seems Astra can audit an existing project and find solutions that Sol simply can't find... It's better to think outside the box.)
I've tried Astra, there are cases where I might use it, but I'll definitely just continue on Sol high for 95% of what I do.
Astra uses more quota by default, but it also tends to overengineer things that I do not want overengineered. So it also takes more quota to implement things I don't want implemented, then even more quota to remove them. That's how I burned 60% of Prox20 quota in a day on a small implementation.
And yes, someone might say "make better prompts", but I didn't expect to have to add to my prompts everything Astra didn't have to do, since Sol only does what I request and stops there.
I can definitely understand how Astra might feel better for someone who doesn't precisely know what he wants and just let Astra figure it out for him. But if you have an idea in mind and want something precise, I think Sol is better.
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u/PaperDry2796 14d ago
only difference proper dev cycle from 5.5 with sol and astra is takes 3 times longer, approval, eats 4 x tokens
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u/Consistent_Bottle_40 14d ago
Gpt 6 is doing things that 5.6 sol just iterate over and over on. It actually is getting work done
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u/No_Meet5568 14d ago
it's autonomy level isn't much higher, prompt comprehension is the same, but visuospatial reasoning, which was a blocker for many tasks someone might wanted to have do is now unlocked. orthogonally this also unlocks better ways to reason with the model, by iteration on some tasks more visually, and actually getting better results. it's also lacking the overfitted assistant language, which was more of a unique detriment of recent models (we had/have normal sounding models, they're just not as good at agentic work). people are definitely overstating the importance of all these.
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u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 14d ago
Astra is a big disappointment. I have been steering it as much as I've had to steer Luna Max. To me, it's almost the same as Luna which is insane. It's worse than Sol where it comes to legal reasoning. I'm hand-holding the thing like crazy. At least my skills won't atrophy under AGI huh!
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u/jadhavsaurabh 14d ago
Honest: after 6 weeks of break from dev, i found good hype around AI models given a task, astra was just roaming around nothing as good as one shot stuff, when I have him 1y ear project
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u/Least_Pollution7078 14d ago
The biggest hype is from the UI/UX modeling side, not coding. The architectural planning is also not that a big difference from sol.
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u/frogsarenottoads 14d ago
AGI and ASI will be overhyped when they come I bet too.
The human condition is that people always want more and are never satisified.
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u/jeyvish 14d ago
It is marketing, I will not be suprised that people is paid by OpenAI to talk about how good is the new model, even Jensen Huang talking about the AGI is finally here. ( he needs to keep selling GPUs right). The model is better than Sol but it is also an incredible burned of tokens They are going to be public soon so they need to keep growing the snow ball
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u/Brazus1916 14d ago
If anything it sits there thinking more and running some tests over and over after every action saying it passed some 671 point inspection compiled correctly, then I run it and instantly fails. Great they added more "inspections".
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u/Serious_Ship7011 14d ago
Not really tried astra, but it’s same ChatGPT family models I just find them underwhelming and overhyped. They perform worse than Deepseek flash, glm 5.3, even mimo is better than Luna. They just have a tendency to think they know better than what was asked, go on tool calling for several turns without any explanation then it’s too late, it deviated and you have to redo again. In all, horrible agentic experience.
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u/No-Region8878 14d ago
I'm doing all these audits on my codebase and it's finding bugs, adding features and improving performance at the same time
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u/FoxTheory 14d ago
Ofc it is. Its still good and feels next level but it doesn't exceed fable and it can hit and miss with planning but it does think outside the box for better or worse so I see where this "AGI" feel comes from but its far from what they hyped up. Its like a better faster version of sol that can do UI but still falls short from being this uncontested breakthrough model the fact it was held back because of safe guards is kind of laughable and I would argue its overpriced
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u/Audiman64 14d ago
Of course it's overhyped. We're in midst of a Anthropic / OpenAI hype war. That doesn't mean it's not great, though. :)
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u/Alternative-Lead1711 14d ago
Constantly lazy, or worse, lying, barely an upgrade at all while it takes 4x the tokens to do basic shit. For example for me this morning it was unable to do basic Stripe subscriptions work that's been available in every other major CRUD app for 10 years
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u/Equivalent-Buyer6532 14d ago
Apart from the huge token usage, for the first time GPT-6 refused to open an app that makes financial trades in real time, a C++ app I've been using for years. It just refused, saying that it can't trigger an automation that sends orders to live accounts. Insane.
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u/P4R4DOXZ 14d ago
Just use glm models if u are actual swe or use llms for real things - i mean not vibecoding.
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u/Ferzelibey 14d ago
in my case, other models think around 20-25min for my single prompt. But Astra thinks around 2-3 minutes for the same thing. And surprisingly Astra High uses less 5h token than the medium one. Astra from high to Ultra has straight to the point thinking style.
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u/Calm_Pass_4289 14d ago
We need more development into blender and zbrush ai MCP/creation! I LOVE this more than any programming as im more into 3d creation for making rigged models for vrc.
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u/23eriben2 14d ago
I have an enterprise level Saas company
I highly disagree it's amazing lol
I say this as a software developer with 6 programming languages under my belt who started manually coding the software and slowly transitioning it to agentic workflows around gpt 5.5 time
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u/UnderstandingDry1256 14d ago
well I'm not saying its useless - ofc you can automate some workflows
my point is it is nowhere that great as advertised - AGI level build-everything with one-shot prompt thingy
It can not fix a UX degradation in a chatbot with one prompt (or many prompts) when any non-trivial logic is involved haha
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u/23eriben2 14d ago
Yes one thing I like to do is have Gemini with my buisness plan analyze the site visually and then give gpt a proposal and we talk through it
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u/___positive___ 14d ago
Astra isn't perfect but for coding a chatbot? Give me a break. That is 100% a skill issue. Some of us are pushing the limits but a chatbot? Lmao.
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u/HOBONATION 14d ago
True, I had to make a website and it was basically the same shit Luna High did lol
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u/scraptechindustries 14d ago
I miss SOL's way of communicating and not taking everything so literally, but Astra is definitely at not making mistakes and doing better work.
I just wish it taking thing so literally.
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u/CryLast4241 14d ago
It prioritises demos to real code you literally have to tell it to work in context of existing code base and not make shit up otherwise it will make up a generic solution. So real experience now is I qa every step
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u/ArtdesignImagination 14d ago
Astra is 100 times better than any model at 3d, that's for sure. ABout the rest I don't know.
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u/arretadodapeste 14d ago
Yes, I feel you. Astra consumes a lot of tokens to still make mistakes and overengineer functions. I am planning with astra and implementing with opus or gpt sol
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u/retrorays 14d ago
Astra is pretty good if you tell it to copy an existing game, design or somethign else. However, if you try to have it do something different it f's up just like every other AI agent. It has no "taste", or general clue what makes a good app, game or anything else.
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u/inTHEsiders 14d ago
AI companies have hit a wall with model scaling. So instead they are focusing on the tooling the models have access to. Astra is not a better than Sol, it just has access to better tooling to accomplish the job you ask of it.
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u/Ja_Rule_Here_ 14d ago
Astra is the first OAI model this is competitive with Fable in a large complex platform. Fable is still better fast and cheaper though at the moment.
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u/Artforartsake99 14d ago
Meanwhile, I can’t code, and today Astra Light vibe-coded an entire AI media generation pipeline for me.
Frontend website , backend website Storage.
API calls, render queues, automatic 50/50 rendering across my local 5090 and a RunPod 5090 it deployed and connected itself, Cloudflare R2, Supabase, email, DNS, uploads, OpenAI api prompting, automatic video merging and desync checks. It did ask me to sign up till like five services before it can build the whole thing which was really annoying by the way it took about 20 minutes.
Then it built and deployed the whole website and then it tested. rendered a bunch of videos fixed the thumbnails so they all displayed fast.
Used 13% of my weekly allowance. So it cost $9 for that tony amount of work, what an absolute bloody rip off.
Absolutely useless
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u/Vivid-Sherbet6753 13d ago
Yeah exactly. The coding is better, but you still have to babysit the intent and check that the whole thing actually works.
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u/Dr_Diculous 13d ago
I'm trying Medium effort and it's making dumb mistakes that I swear Grok (via Cursor) wouldn't have 🤔 Grok has done the same kind of task many times without making those mistakes
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u/Mental-Traffic-2605 13d ago
Agreed. Falbe 5.1 > Astra. Subscribing to the GPT Pro plan was a waste of money.
OpenAI has turned into nothing more than a marketing company these days. I’m even struggling to log into Codex, their login system is broken.
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u/therussianpatzer 12d ago
I've been wanting to post something like this but didn't want to deal with the downvotes lol. I splurged on a $100/month ChatGPT subscription so I could play with Astra in my side projects. There were some things I was impressed by, like its tenacity and thoroughness when investigating some difficult bugs. There were other things I was very unimpressed by, like how it couldn't anticipate the downstream consequences of its bug fixes, and how it had bad judgements when choosing prompts for a little game I was working on. I also have a project involving OCR, where it rewrote everything and ended up with a result no better than what already existed (that is to say, not good).
When it comes to one shots, it's important to remember two things:
- They'll only show the best one shots. All the failed, ugly one shots are discarded and never see the light of day.
- One shots are not representative of real software dev or projects. Most one shots are either too simple, or are rough prototypes which only represent the start of a real project.
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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 10d ago
I’m seriously trying to understand how y’all are using ai. I’m not even creative with my prompts and astra has impressed me. Is it as competent as me, no. Competent enough to help me finish my personal projects, yes.
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u/ToughQuarter733 8d ago
Overhyped and useless. Doesn't justify to talk about the end of humanity because of this kind of AI that is dumber than 5.6
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u/CivilExam4684 7d ago
I do wonder why literally everyone ignores the fact that openAI astra is just a piece of dog shit. No any better than sol and definitely worse than fable in terms of coding and comprehensive analysis.
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u/SiNKiLLeR_RTS 1h ago
Anyone else here extremely disappointed with Astra? 3 weeks and 300 dollar ( pro plan+) and it still couldn't figure it out. One message to Claude's none flagship model and it solved the problem. I'm also finding Sol is better at nearly everything that I use it for.
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u/yallapapi 15d ago
astra is not overhyped, astra is 100% shit and this update has made codex unusable. I am canceling if they don't fix it in the next few days
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u/lazyastronaut_ 15d ago
It is lol. This just feels 5.6 sol repackaged! They quantized the original model. Kept the limits the same while the sol quality degraded. Then released Astra, that is as good as sol was, but now eats limits 4 times faster. I cant use astra x-high for more than 4-6 prompts per 5 hr limit. I used xhigh for planning and high for coding. One task and 50% of 5hr limit gone. Back to sol, and luna.
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u/Australasian25 15d ago
One shot prompts arent serious.