However for typical low to medium difficulty code, it will often either overengineer stuff, create massive functions instead of organized code, and just write very hard to read code. It literally looks like minified code. Clearly they trained it to reduce the number of output tokens and in turn the code is often atrocious. I'll keep trying Astra but I might actually go back to 5.6 sol for many tasks if I keep getting these results.
I gave Astra a pretty straightforward bug ticket yesterday. The bug involved an edge case that could sometimes result in an invalid value getting stored in a user profile field. Pretty harmless, no crash or anything, just annoying.
Based on past experience, I don't trust OpenAI, so I decided to watch Astra as it worked. About four minutes in, it convinced itself that it should also check the prod database to see "how far the corruption has spread" and attempted to SSH into the hosting provider. This resulted in my 1Password to prompt me, which I of course denied. Then I stopped Astra, closed the ChatGPT/Codex app and gave the task to Opus 5. Suffice it to say I will not be renewing my subscription, because "you have to watch it like a hawk" is the opposite of agentic engineering.
This isn't intended to stop a model like Astra hacking its way out of course, it's more like guardrails on a staircase.
My personal container manager tool has an intercepting SSL proxy and small Javascripts on the host can rewrite or block HTTP requests. The agent gets its own isolated home directory and can't tamper with mine. Local caches like Maven are mapped read/only with a write layer on top.
Negative feedback filed and ChatGPT uninstalled.
If enraged_camel had been doing something else involving the production database at the wrong time, they might have accepted the 1Password prompt.
The way I use it now is I'll ask a chat 6 Pro session to make a plan and then have Sol implement it, then 6 Pro reviews it. This seems fine and it doesn't use my Codex minutes, so I'll use Astra. But on the metered tasks I don't see the utility.
This is a problem for OpenAI because if Sol is good enough, and they don't have a moat, then it's only a matter of time before Sol-level models are open sourced and running locally. I know I'll be doing that as soon as I can.
Much the same as you're saying, I never got around to verifying how much of that was because of Astra being better vs just being a different model sent specifically to those tasks because the token usage didn't make sense to spend unless it was something not working in Sol. So even if it was all due to Astra being fantastic I'd still not like to use the model for the cost being even more fantastic.