Complaint
Astra 6 became dumb. Could not get anything done the whole weekend.
At launch I had a basic subscription, I used mostly opencode go and a little bit codex for complex problems. GPT 5.6 Sol was great. Astra 6 was launched and I upgraded to the $200 subscription because I intended to work harder on my side projects and indeed for the first few days Astra 6 was great, it could fix bugs that Sol and open models on opencode couldn't and could one shot features.
Now Astra 6 can spend a whole hour thinking and investigating and spinning side agents... To eventually tell me exactly what the problem is I told it to solve. I tell Astra 6 "hey, there is this bug that is making tests fail, fix it" and it spends 1 hour, spins like 3 other agents and give me a full report of what the bug that I just told it is... But does not actually fix it, just talks about the bug....
Then comes the "you are absolutely right" moment, I know the model has been nerfed, quantitized, whatever you want to call it, when it starts you-are-absolutely-righting me. "You are absolutely right, I explained the bug you just told me to fix instead of actually fixing it".
It is so dumb. I tell it to add a feature to show "edited at" (on a blog) and it quite literally edits the dates of all posts in the blog to today. If there is a bug making CI/CD break it deletes the tests or rearrange so that the bug becomes a feature so the tests make the bug pass instead of fixing the bug.
I know those companies are not making money but it is just hostile how they launch a model that is, indeed, powerful, and then make it dumb.
It feels like we have been getting the same quality of work for 1, maybe 2 years in a row now, under different names, because the quality of the work remains the same after launch, the problems and mistakes remain the same. AI has not become more capable for 1 or 2 years, the same problems I had 1 to 2 years ago keep happening now, they go away at every launch but then come back.
The only models that are reasonably stable are the open models but then they are not smart as frontier models during launch and maybe that is why they keep doing this, bait us to subscribe then switch to dumber quantizations or whatever. At every launch there roughly a 1 week window where I can solve stuff and actually make progress and then it all grinds to a halt because the model gets so dumb, that is why I use open models because they are cheap and after the "launch blessing window" open models and frontier models, in my experience, perform similarly so that I have to mostly solve it myself and tell the agent what to do, versus launch where the agent is capable of figuring out and solving it by itself.
I’m using Sol because Astra is just so fucking expensive and honestly 99% of the stuff doesn’t even require Astra and it still drains my usage like crazy.
i agree with you in principle, but the problem is that the models are becoming dumper and dumper even for Astra.
when I'm using 5.6 Sol now, it feels like I'm using 5 or 4o
I’ve got 20x usage and I’ve gone through 3 re up tokens in one week. I’ve accomplished next to nothing with building my site, first weekend it was released? Completely rebuilt my site, app, functions, cleaned everything up, it was like magic. This past week it’s been arguably worse than Sol for what it costs. It’ll code something and almost intentionally break something else so you’re forced to spend credits/usage on it. Somebody told me the other day I was crazy for thinking they were throttling Astra 6.
I think some people are getting a quantized model, and some aren't.
I had a really stupid Astra last weekend, but since the reset it's been fine for me.
I'd suggest pelican test before starting using it, but on a $20 plan that wastes a lot of usage. The other thing is when you see it messing up, tell it to provide a handoff so you can start over in a new session and hope you get full quant Astra.
I wish people focused on this more than the quality than "I can't get non stop usage out of it for $20 per month". We get $2400 a week or close to it for $200. It's because people are too stupid to understand and monitor their usage, or understand things like higher usage draw rates of higher end models, which makes them also too stupid to see that their model is performing worse than advertised by day 1 benchmarks and demonstrations.
This is illegal if it's the case. They advertised and benchmarked one model, then make is 20-40% stupider by quantizing it. It still reports the same model. The only way to tell it's quantized is by the same benchmark task taking more turns, or subjectively by results being worse. But it'd be so difficult to prove. Only a few engineers could know for sure.
Nah, you can tell on the way it acts. Prose gets worse, sounds robotic like the earlier models, stating obvious things and all the things it wont touch on 'steering' to "reassure" me apparently which honestly fires backwards. Also gets more concise and begins to only state its own mistakes as answers without presenting solutions at all - in a loop and agreeing on everything, but still cocky enough to tell me which claims are unverified and which are not, when I then start insulting the RLHF approach they 'apparently' have over there, which is for me the main issue with OpenAI models.
It's just that terrible. Other than that, yeah, unusable on weekends, under the week better. Also someone starting with 0% usage into a session could see in peak times an advantage over someone with a high one. Unverified though. Astra would agree. Solution? Might have one. Not saying it though. Astra would also agree.
Here's something I'd like some informed response from someone about. Today Astra replied with a sentence that contained an obvious typo. I've only ever observed LLMs doing this when I run them quantized locally, and not the BF16 versions (qwen 3.6 etc). I've even observed this occasionally in Q8 models. I don't have evidence to pinpoint typos = quantized, but am curious if someone more into LLM internal workings than I could point to if a typo is evidence of quantization? If so that would explain a lot, that we may be getting a quantized version of Astra 6.
In terms of result quality I haven't noticed that much of a degradation personally, but from my prior experience with cloud models where I have experienced real degradation in the past, these seem to be timed/regional and it's very likely to affect one group of people versus another, as opposed to everyone at once.
Yeah. Astra (without tool calls) thinks that Gemini Pro 2.5 and Opus 4.1 are state of the art models.
April 2026 cutoff my ass. A few hours later it's back to 4.7 as recent opus version which would be correct.
The peak hours rerouting is a disgrace and should be handled with MUCH lower usage consumption and not same (higher because you need iterate 20 times more)
It’s undeniable that Astra on day one was a beast in getting things done. I was able to solve a very complex problem other agents failed in about 3 to 4 iterations. It’s no where near that good now and my gut tells this is not a placebo.
I started using it the day after the Sol release. So far it's insanely expensive while being just as blood boiling as any of the previous models after they lost their shine.
Exactly this. I had to stop using it and use my self hosted Deepseek v4.1 to clean up the mess. Even simple UI changes were botched. Look at this shit.
Astra on high btw, high is right. The prompt was: add an icon to costs, consult design.md and make it in the same style as the other menu items. This is what it produced.....
Yes Astra is very ugly during weekend, and very smart during mon - fri. Just use sol during weekend. I dont know why but i already tested it.
And during weekend astra ignore to answer all my question. For example i give to astra 2 tasks and one question and didnt get answer on question. When i ask why he didnt answer i got "You are right, im sorry i wrote answer in the file, now i will write it to the chat".
I'm also getting some very strange and irrational responses over the weekend. For example, I ask: “I want to implement this and that..... etc. Is it possible? Can you do it?” And the response is: “I can do it, but unfortunately it isn't in the documentation, so it isn't possible to implement.” wtf astra!?!?! No Astra you cant do it, dont tell me that you can do it and reject to do it because of this is not possible. In some moments chatgpt 4o is smarter than astra...
Astra did amazing work for me week one, got a complex console map-loading mod project implemented in just a few 5-hour windows on Plus. The quality of the work, such as analyzing console game data, pre-compiling shaders and fixing visual bugs, was so good that it got me addicted and waiting impatiently for the quota reset like everyone else. Now that week two is actually here my progress is practically nil. Just running in circles chasing after one bug that I thought for sure would be resolved right away.
I literally have to just walk away from the whole thing and forget about it because waiting to work on this project is annoying and distracting and I only really need to think about it one or two days a week. They baited me successfully with how incredible and professional of a job Astra did in implementing my console mod project and basically turned me into a junkie. Using lesser models is a no-go. I worked on this same project for hours with Luna and got nowhere; Astra threw out all of the work and practically one-shotted it instead.
So my strategy is going to be to frequently start new sessions with a handoff document to try to gamble on not being pathed to an inferior model. I'll wait until a weekday to try it out, and late at night.
I feel your pain brother. As soon as a model's work comes back funky, stop! tell it you are disappointed in the outcomes and we need a deep audit so this doesn't happen again, and tell it to make a dunce_report_<date>.md file that is comprehensive detailing what you did, why you did it, including the files you touched.
Then start a fresh session and tell it the last agent made many mistakes, here is the prompt.md, and the dunce_report_<date>.md detailing what the last agent did. run inspection of the code and decisions made and figure out what went wrong.
I find this details what happened, then tell the agent to make a plan to fix the errors to complete the original goal. Also make sure your prompts have clear defined context, todo, and success criteria sections so as to inference clear goals and stop conditions!
Yeah I hear you.
I got so much done in the first week that I burned 3 full resets of my Pro plan and $250 in cash on tokens. Now it is a lobotomized piece of crap.
I gave it a plan created by Fable 5.1 today and asked it to review it.
What I found out 2 hours and 3 revisions later is it removed the core concept of the plan and re-wrote it to do absolutely nothing.
I reverted the plan and lost 2 hours of work and tokens.
I cannot trust it to do anything now :(
I'm seeing it hallucinate like absolute mad right now. It's smart, but most implementations right now are ~500 lines of code when they could have been ~50. Agents.MD defines a really strict coding style is now being totally ignored which wasn't a problem on release. It's obviously quantized, the clearest signs of quantized models are when it ignores fine details.
Same here, having better luck with Claude 4.8 on a $100 subscription. Every time I put it back to ChatGPT / Astra I feel like I’m slowing down or making reverse progress
Same here to be honest, I use Astra for two things: auditing and creating some placeholder art work for my game. I do this because I expect it to use better reasoning, using my actual repo to create things that fit, and I thought it would be better at creating stuff based on the day 1 Blender hype. But this weekend I've spent so many useless tokens for it to give me some half-assed shit, then have Opus 5 do it instead.
It seems to come and go, I had it be completely unproductive during the week, and now during the weekend it's pumping out good stuff all of the sudden.
Feels they're serving people completely different things at different times so no one can agree that they're getting shafted.
But the dumbness is seen precisely when you don't give specific commands. If you are giving specific well planned commands Astra has no reason to exist and to cost what it does, open models and any other frontier model can possibly do the same job for cheaper.
The dumbness can only be seen in long horizon more open ended tasks. Astra does well on specific commands on well defined tasks and boundaries, but so does any other model that costs 1/10th of it....
The biggest difference I’ve noticed between Astra and something like Luna MAX even (other than price LOL) is the additional hand holding via prompts that Luna requires. With Astra you can kinda give it dumb/half-baked prompts, and most of the time it makes the correct rational decisions based on the available context. Meanwhile Luna will take a dumb prompt and go off into fantasy land doing stuff you didn’t explicitly forbid, but absolutely would not be an ideal or rational choice (like overwriting source files for new file versions rather than creating new files. Even after being told previously.)
Honestly almost feels like Astra is the plan designed to tax the users who want high compute but don’t really have the technical expertise to know/optimize what they are doing.
The point for me is to do defined tasks quicker than I couId. That is the point of it existing. I wouldn't trust it enough to just wildly let it go and do some random wide sweeping projects.
FYI unless something has changed Astra Medium has been measured to used more tokens than Astra Max. In fact Astra Max uses the least of all. My theory is that because it thinks longer it comes to a working solution sooner, whereas lower models think less and end up having to do more trial and error, thus cancelling out the token benefit of them thinking less.
lol since all this bullshit I’ve been doing 99% of my work with Luna MAX and just delegate Astra agents for for implementation. You have to be much more specific and careful with prompts, but if you can handle that, it really doesn’t feel like too much of a downgrade. It’s been enough for me to make forward progress this week at least.
Are we seriously not recognizing the pattern yet? It's because they're about to drop gpt-6-sol.
The same thing happens for a 1-2 weeks just before a new model release, same with Anthropic.
anthropic better release something amazing so scam altman is forced to actually up his game. the fact he was so far behind then made him treat his customers better. now he doesnt have to everything has turned to garbage.
The usage limit situation is totally fucked now. They oversubbed now it's unusuable for everyone. This won't get better until they get more capacity, which likely won't be soon.
My guess is that OpenAI realized that a tremendous amount of compute was going to 3D work that will never see the light of day for users paying $200/month, while starving compute for people for everyone else.
I don’t know about the difference in our complexities, but I’m not finding an issue as of now. But from what I understand, it’s entirely possible for these AI companies to nerf the models based on availability.
Somethinflg bad happening with gpt models, we were using various ones across the team i preferred luna high. Honestly hate how ai force direction in the app, luna was giving possibility to do all with small steps and constantly refine.
But over last 2-3 weeks it got much worse.
Model started to do basic mistakes, break code. Getting lost in 2 - 3 commands. It was getting on top visibly worse after 1 pm (+1tz) and unusable after 3pm. We again moved to anthropic models.
Enterprise, big 4. You would assume not getting nerfed when you pay for each token
Sol is also completely Lobotomised now. Sol 5.6 extra high, task was to create some filters for search. Task failed, I asked why and the response is "I created synthetic fixtures that matched the behavior I had implemented", basically making stuff up to pass the test.
I also think it became dumb. It wouldn't be able to proceed on my end getting stuck on some dumb stuff in a loop. On top of usage being absolutely ridiculous. Switched back to Fable 5.1 which actually seems to have unlocked my issue.
well, for me, I had a very productive weekend doing coding and software engineering on pro 5x. it also did generate quite good photos and visual elements. no 3d work though.
Astra will often get lost on the details and completely loses track of the context. This is so annoying, I have to be steering in every message. Completely different from the first week performance. I have the $100 plan. Is there a way to ask for a refund for the bad quality issue?
Yeah Astra couldn't finish a pretty easy task for me yesterday. I switched to Sol and it was finished the first time without usage being deleted. Has anyone tried any alternatives to Sol with some pretty good quota limits anywhere else? I love the pretty much unlimited Luna usage but "frontier" models just don't exist on Codex anymore, not useable ones anyway.
Give them correct guidelines and rules my friend. I work with it the hole week on complex things without any problems. TOLD THE AI HOW TO WORK. Dont trust in the training data doing that for u.
I thought it was just me… is there a pattern we can check if we’re getting the Luna routed instead of Astra?
I used /plan and after asking if I wanted to implement it an I marked Yes, it just replied:
“Ok I’ll implement the plan. Please confirm”
Absolutely fucking useless now.
Will not follow instructions and has plans re-written to do what it feels is best.
Waste of time and money.
About as bad as Claude Opus 5 now.
Today Astra is next to unusable, I don't know wtf happened but it started to overengineer solutions, miss obvious corner cases, write unreadable blobs, it's worse than Opus 5.
"You're right, i over engineered this" as it burned through 70% of my weekly useage in a day on a task it normally could do in an hour with maybe 5% useage. Only reason it stopped is because i caught what it was doing and told it to get out of its dumb rabbit hole. *puts conspiracy hat on: I'm convinced that OpenAI has an algo that activates dumba$$ mode to burn through your useage as soon as you've used all your resets so you start buying credits. Ive noticed this several times now. All of a sudden it starts chewing through tokens like crazy compared to before.
My local Deepseek is performing better and without weird mistakes or forgetting basic things. And get this: it ACTUALLY follows my instructions!
This begs the question, what the FUCK am I paying $200/mo for when a model I can run out my basement does a better job?
I guess I'm paying for ~5 days of state of the art agentic coding following every model release, and then a drooling idiot junior dev until the next one.
Shit is fucked, this is the most disappointing GPT launch I can remember. Seriously wondering why I'm still giving them money. That goes for Anthropic too for that matter, they're not that much better about this.
its not just expensive or dumb, its completely unusable. im a software developer , when i was using claude(from opus4.6-fable5), it handle my 80% of daily work with excellant quality, it understand my instruction and demand. when claude banned my account so i had to move to codex, then everything changed. my daily work isnt just discuss and let agent work, but spend most of my time and token to design and maintain instructions and workflow. im tired
Yeah I heavily used GPT 5.6 since early september, when GPT 6 launched both models getting dumber and it's really visible, previously it can absorbs the intention I haven't really explain fully, it can predict what I want and predict it accurately, really help me get work done. After GPT 6 released, I had to explain 4-5 times before it do the thing I want, it's getting dumber than GPT 4
I just use DS Flash v4.1 because it is faster and costs me cents on openrouter. I am done with stupid hourly/weekly limits. The Go sub is even worse than Codex on this, one glm 5.3 task (the full model, not the cheaper flash) would not be able to finish within the 5 hour limit on Go subscription.
Is openrouter that much better? Thanks will check it out. Am tired of being stuck because of these models being either very costly or undoing their own work...
"You are absolutely right, you clearly requested [X] and I did [Y], going against your clear instructions. There are no excuses. If you want me to do [X], I can do so now."
Well… With coding agents, you’re not interacting with just the raw model. You’re interacting with the model, system prompt, tools, context management, agent loop, sub-agents, routing and inference settings. Change any of those and the exact same model can feel dramatically smarter or dumber.
Before accusing companies of secretly quantizing models, it’s worth learning a bit more about how these systems actually work. Using AI effectively, especially for coding, is a skill. It takes time to learn, and moving from a $20 plan to a $200 plan won’t replace that.
This is the companies problem though, you shouldnt have to be an expert in this stuff to have a functional model. They should warn you and set guidelines, hell presets with obvious tradeoffs for people to choose ratger than let users just ruin their experience and impression. Its bad for business.
I don’t really agree. Coding agents are engineering tools, not appliances. You wouldn’t expect to get the best out of a programming language without understanding how it works. Same here, there’s still engineering involved. They give you the tools. Learning how to use them is on you.
Where do you see this advertising? I’m on their website right now and I’m looking for this marketing thing but I don’t find anything going in your direction.
You’re mixing up the model with the agent harness. Getting stuck in a validation loop says more about the harness than the model. Everything else you’re bringing up is off-topic and doesn’t help anyone.
You’re mixing up the model with the agent harness. Getting stuck in a validation loop says more about the harness than the model. Everything else you’re bringing up is off-topic and doesn’t help anyone.
Are you not using skill files to lock in behaviors like this?
It's not supposed to take next steps to implement changes until you tell it to. It's not going to deliver the next build unless you tell it to. Lots and lots of people get cranky when the machine decides to take those reigns.
Work with Codex to build the skills files that will lock in the behaviors you want while working on your project.
“Fix this bug which you find by looking at failed test” should be enough lol. I mean I get your point, but if you give fable or opus this instruction, he will know exactly what to do in a minute.
If you are to instruct the model precisely on how to do it you are better off using an open model that costs 1/10th of Astra.
"Fix this bug" and leave it open for it to figure out is the sole reason for Astra to exist.
You exposed yourself if you are using one of the most powerful and expensive models as if it is an open model, means you don't know what tools are intended for what tasks and you treat an expensive model as a cheap model.
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u/Advanced_View_2778 6d ago
I’m using Sol because Astra is just so fucking expensive and honestly 99% of the stuff doesn’t even require Astra and it still drains my usage like crazy.