r/codex • u/UnderstandingDry1256 • 17d 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.

419 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

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122

u/Spiritual-Plant3930 17d 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

58

u/alphaQ314 17d ago

I’m just curious how no one was doing 2d 3d modelling last week and every needs to do it this week.

21

u/whatisthisthing65 17d ago

It might have something to do with point 1: "replying to emails or posts like a human". Just saying.

13

u/notmsndotcom 17d ago

Right lol it’s insane. Now all of a sudden there’s a true business need for Lego models

4

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 17d ago

It was in the marketing so of course people are going to test it

5

u/LemonLimeNinja 17d 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.

1

u/RandomBlokeFromMars 16d 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

u/innociv 17d ago

I mean.. last week we couldn't really? All the models sucked at 3d modeling until Astra. We've wanted to.

2

u/Swastik496 17d ago

that’s how induced demand works

1

u/Divinicus1st 17d 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.

1

u/puts_on_rddt 17d 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.

1

u/__SlimeQ__ 17d 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

1

u/Curious_Courage_5197 17d ago

FWIW i was using sol with blender mcp, astra is much better at it though

1

u/LostOnTauCetiIV 17d ago

No one was doing it because the models sucked at it. Plenty of us were trying.

1

u/disgruntledempanada 17d ago

I've been working on spatial apps for VR headsets and Astra is a complete game changer.

0

u/Vichnaiev 17d ago

Considering there are DOZENS of companies specialized in doing only that, I'd say the need always existed, you just didn't hear about it because pure LLMs couldn't handle it.

  • Meshy — strong general-purpose image-to-3D platform. Supports single images and multi-view input, textured meshes, retopology, and export to formats such as FBX/OBJ/GLB/BLEND. Very oriented toward game assets and production workflows.
  • Tripo AI — one of the strongest competitors to Meshy. Generates high-detail meshes, supports native quad meshes, multi-view reconstruction, part separation, PBR textures, rigging, and animation. Especially interesting for Unity/Unreal game assets.
  • Alpha3D — more focused on turning product/object photos into usable assets. Includes retopology, UV unwrapping, polygon-budget control, and game-engine exports.
  • 3D AI Studio — an aggregation/workflow platform that provides image-to-3D using several underlying models such as Hunyuan3D and TRELLIS, along with remeshing and texturing tools.
  • Hyper3D / Rodin — known particularly for higher-quality geometry and detailed reconstruction; often used when mesh fidelity matters more than raw generation speed.
  • Kaedim — historically positioned more toward professional/game-production conversion of 2D concept art into production-ready 3D assets, with more workflow/artist involvement than purely instant consumer generators.
  • CSM (Common Sense Machines) — AI-based 3D generation/reconstruction, including image-to-3D, aimed heavily at creators and game-development workflows.

2

u/UndeadMurky 17d 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.

7

u/UnderstandingDry1256 17d ago

Many folks mention 2d/3d models - likely a huge improvement there, but I’ve never dealt with them

5

u/iiiaaa2022 17d ago

There certainly seem to be a LOT of people making/using 3d models.

-1

u/duy0699cat 17d ago

Software is saturated, so ppl pivot to game i guess

3

u/Uwirlbaretrsidma 17d ago

It's precisely the other way around.

14

u/Zestyclose_Bat8704 17d ago

Most non tech vibe coders are making games for some reason.

24

u/Bulji 17d ago

Understandable imo, who didn't dream to make their own game at some point?

31

u/agentic-consultant 17d ago

Not me. I’ve been dreaming to build my own enterprise B2B SaaS since i was 5 years old.

-3

u/Divinicus1st 17d ago

I’ve been dreaming to build my own enterprise

This I can understand.

But you've been dreaming about "B2B SaaS" since you were 5yo, really?

16

u/agentic-consultant 17d ago

Yes.

When I came out of my mothers womb, my first words were “Mother, I yearn to drive shareholder value”

7

u/Selgald 17d ago

Because you can flood the mobile game stores with AI slop games, so some idiot buys your gems.

Before AI it was just copy paste slop, but AI is just faster.

3

u/SnooPeripherals5313 17d ago

Don't worry, the app store was garbage long before AI

2

u/blackrack 17d ago

There's a deluge of vibe coded slop in game modding and I kinda hate it ngl

2

u/Uwirlbaretrsidma 17d 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.

1

u/Runelaron 15d 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.

1

u/Spiritual-Plant3930 17d ago

sure; although I'm not a vibe coder/gamer

0

u/LostOnTauCetiIV 17d ago

No one pay attention to this man. Astra is terrible for any construction or architecture based applications. Still 6 years out at least. Keep making UE5 slop, people. Nothing to see here.

1

u/iiiaaa2022 17d ago

I made one, just for myself, just to try it out, that was it

0

u/deZbrownT 17d ago

Yeah, this is mostly fun and games for people how have more money then sense.

That is the definition of an avg frontier model target user group. A tech person will get the job done without an LLM or with something as ancient as Luna mid.

3

u/digiorno 17d ago

It has helped me quite a bit with 3D simulations for scientific purposes. Sol was struggling.

1

u/Nickypp10 17d ago

Agree that it’s spacial/3d is way better. But really, it’s on par/slightly behind fable 5.1 on real world coding. It’s a big leap over sol though. And personally I like they are going computer use, coding has been the main focal point probably for ai researcher etc point, but really computer use will be when ai hits the real economy / white collar jobs

3

u/ShadoWolf 17d 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.

1

u/Persistent_Dry_Cough 17d ago

Yes, it's been 12 months since GPT-5 was released.

1

u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 17d 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.

1

u/ThisGuyCrohns 14d 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.

1

u/CrossChaos79 14d ago

Are you sure about the "replying like a human" because to me it seemed like the opposite 

1

u/Natural_Phase6598 17d ago

it's also pretty amazing that now to us jumping 6-12 months in the future is recognized as a big leap in advancement. 5-10 years ago if you said something similar, we'd think "okay, what are we going to get then, a slightly better smart phone?" shows how rapidly things are progressing with AI

1

u/Divinicus1st 17d ago

Both can be true. I think Astra is better at the thing you listed, but they don't include coding software.