I think frontier models feel terrible after a new model requires you to do less babysitting, it's just really hard to go back once you've had to handhold less.
The only way I use Astra and 6.1 Sol now is if they're being orchestrated by Opus 5.5 so I don't have to talk to them directly.
Reminds me of GPT-5, smart but wrote crap code, until they improved the code training with 5.3 and 5.4.
They want to condition you to equal cheap with bad
Part of my private benchmark suite involves recreating the final scene of the movie Wargames. The coding agent gets the brief 3-paragraph overview, a few screenshots for reference, and is expected to render the scene where WOPR plays through various scenarios, with a frenetic ending.
Out of ~80 different coding agents I tried, 6.1 Sol on medium was the only one to phone it in by taking the reference screenshots, and painting extremely basic, ugly, mis-aligned missile trajectories over it, never bothering with the whole brief.
Another of my benchmarks involves reimplementing Wolfenstein 3d from a few screenshots and very brief descriptions. It again took those screenshots, and zoomed in and out on them, pretending this represents the walk through the dungeon. Substantially less capable models such as Qwen 3.8 27b running on my laptop did a much better job. And no other agent I benchmarked tried to cheat like that.
i'm begging people to stop looking at token prices