I just tell everyone to use Fable 5.1 for everything at this point. Astra is unfortunately a dud, I'm sure they will try to fix a bunch of it with GPT-6.1 but OAI has had this issue for awhile now where every other generation has some sort of strange tic, or reward hacking issue, or something. It's almost like they are balancing the RL on the tip of a needle.

Opus 5 has issues too, comment-slop, claude-ish, etc.

5.1 on the other hand can seemingly do no wrong. Easy to work with, writes human-level code. Expensive, yes, but even at Low effort it's well worth it.

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jacobgold 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My trick for using Opus is using it exclusively as a subagent managed by Fable.

"Use Opus subagents for this work where possible" is all it takes generally.

In my experience Astra/Sol are both quite good as workhorses, but not at Fable's level. I use them every day very successfully and I'm very picky.

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spockz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Quite good as work horses? To me Luna is the work horse and Sol and Astra are prancing thoroughbreds. If I use Sol or Astra for anything other than curated reasoning and planning I will burn through my usage limits in an hour.

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extr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I used to do this but recently I switched to having Fable 5.1 spawn forks of itself rather than Opus subagents. Yes it's more expensive but you don't pay for reads that already happened pre-fork, and you end up doing less rework since Fable agents are just much smarter.

	▲	jacobgold 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That makes sense. I'm also using $200/mo Claude subscriptions, so I want to take advantage of the other 50% by using Opus.

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jrockway 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with you on this. Opus feels tedious and it cannot be stopped from doing change-narration comments, but Fable feels like a real collaborator. I am usually pretty happy with the code it writes.

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jawarner 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting, in my experience Astra is a marked improvement over both Sol 5.6 and Fable 5.1. Its output feels a lot more natural, and it is just less "dumb." But individual experiences may vary.

	▲	extr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a great model and you're right it does feel quite natural at times while Fable 5.1 still has a claude-ish shape to it. Unfortunately I just find that it's not reliable enough as a daily driver and ends up performing specialist tasks rather than being the primary pane of glass.

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triyambakam 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What have you noticed about Astra? I haven't used Claude models lately so I can't compare but it seems fine compared to 5.6 Sol

	▲	extr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		- It doesn't write great code. - Occasionally has strange tics around asking for permission for obvious next-steps, implied actions, etc. - It's very expensive, both in terms of tokens and % usage on subscription plans. - Relatedly, effort level is unintuitive. Sometimes it seems like higher effort levels are actually cheaper due to not under-thinking and needing to correct work. But other times they are overkill and send the model into rabbitholes. That said, it's fantastic as a code-reviewer or "hunter seeker". It's better at finding bugs than Fable and "Get this well articulated task done single-mindedly" is an Astra-shaped task.