There is something deeply wrong with Astra. I can’t quite put my finger on it. On the one hand it is a lot more knowledgeable, which makes sense since it’s a larger model. On the other hand that knowledge doesn’t reliably translate to intelligence or insight. Certainly tasks like 3D modeling it does extremely well. Other stuff like complex coding problems in an existing codebase it stumbles more often than not. This morning it ran around in circles. It implemented a feature, then convinced itself that it should have followed “proper TDD”,
deleted all the code it had written and wrote 8,500 LoC of unit tests. At that point I was down to 35% of quota so I stopped it and gave the task to Opus 5.
Really weird model. No idea how it did so well on all the benchmarks.