It wants things beyond what the mortals (us) know to reach for. It's not good at explaining itself, it doesn't show it's thinking. It's often not wrong. But the no compromises attitude can be unbearable to deal with. Especially given how little it cares about telling us.
The other explanation is just as part of ‘token efficiency’
Otherwise I'm using 5.6 Sol for actual plan execution and review..
Astra was/is superior for planning type tasks. It was capable of doing seemingly magic things with rather vague/lazy instructions ("I need to be able to test this on Windows, maybe a qemu VM or something? Shrug." ... 1 hour later "yeah i built you a whole qemu + eval windows image + harness of powershell scripts + shell scripts to retrieve & verify harness.").
And for UI work -- which is not something I do a lot of but do here and there -- it was clearly superior to 5.6 Sol.
But it also feels sloppier? Somehow. And too expensive to use.
We'll see how Sol 6 is.
Terra had the "workhorse" quality where it could do these changes in bulk and follow directions without being too 'smart' (but sloppy) as you described. Luna was a bit too dumb and would make sloppy mistakes; I see that more as a "run these tests and format the results" sort of model. Maybe 6 Luna will be better.
I also just reread your comment and realized the naming convention is still extremely confusing with respect to ordering of [Family]x[Model]x[Number].
When people spend their days interacting with machines that pretend to be human, they may then start treating real humans like machines.
If I leave Astra overnight, I'll wake up with three new different projects, each of them 20% done and having nothing to do with my original goal.
Like you said, it felt very natural to work with. Opus 5 is way too slow and verbose for me, I find I get distracted and annoyed with it.
Opus 5.5 seems a LOT closer so far to what I liked about 5.6 Sol but we'll see
Highlight and lowlight of my week was successfully convincing the OpenAI support chat robot to give me a refund for the month for my issues with 6 chewing threw my usage with no output.