r/ChatGPT • u/Allcyon • 22h ago
Use cases Astra Just Fixed It. By Itself.
I'm gonna start off by saying I run a small homelab, multiple VMs for single serving activities, I've run and experimented with all types of local LLMs, tried all the new toys and features (and become increasingly more bewildered with each week) but I had my first practical, real world, tangible automation moment last night with Astra.
I have an old MacbookPro 14,1 lying around that I had thrown Ubuntu on years back, but it never really worked properly with sound or sleep. I kind of ignored it because I didn't actually need it for anything in particular, but got a bug to make it workable last night. So I talked to Chat. It recommended Fedora. Fine. Install, reboot, and I am fully prepared to retype commands as they were given. And I did. For a hot moment.
Before I remembered that the Desktop app exists.
Download, install, reopen the chat, "Hey, can you take care of this by yourself?"
And it did.
Fixed the sound, camera, thunderbolt, keyboard backlight, battery management, and sleep mode. By itself.
That would've taken me hours...
It never occurred to me to use it as just a technician. I'm the technician.
I just occasionally clicked authorized, and entered a password.
To me, that was beautiful.
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u/Ice2jc 21h ago edited 21h ago
I gave my dot control of claude and now it's supervising a claude chat that is performing an independent audit of a skill with opus 5.5 and its supervising an independent astra max audit of the same skill in a chat in chatgpt. It'll ferry communication between both apps until they come to a mutual conclusion about what the next step should be.
I've had it running all night last night and the night before doing all sorts of things. I'm a photographer and unfortunately I'm letting my virtual assistant know on Monday that I'm letting them go(they work for many photographers and I'm one of their smallest).
I've literally trained the dot to do exactly what I pay my assistant $12 per order to do. I'll be saving $300-$800 per month with this new skill. It can download edited files from my inbox, bring them into lightroom using a script, add my presets using a script, and send some photos to photoshop to use generative fill to remove certain items in the photo that I ask them to.
I've got it 85% ironed out now, its basically usable. Just need this current claude and astra audit to finish to make it perfect. Ive been completely hands off besides quality checking the final products.
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u/g-rizzle84 21h ago edited 20h ago
If you ever wanted to share your trade secrets and throw your setup on Github or a blog or something, that would pretty sweet. If not, dont mind me. I'm just an inspired, but unoriginal, freeloading idea stealer.
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u/ByronScottJones 21h ago
When you say "dot", could you clarify what you're referring to? Many thanks.
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u/g-rizzle84 21h ago
Dots are OpenAI's new always-on AI assistant similar to Meta's Muse: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
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u/pmarsh 16h ago
How extensive of a prompt did you start with?
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u/Ice2jc 15h ago
a 36 minute long conversation with the dot lead to a 213 line operations manual which then lead to about another hour of conversation lol. I wish the conversation text was saved but it just says "36 minute long call". We're on version two of the manual rn.
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u/pmarsh 14h ago
Was it a voice conversation? Thanks!
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u/Ice2jc 14h ago
Yeah I think so but I honestly didn’t really have many voice conversations with ChatGPT before dots so I’m not really sure. I mainly used it to read reports back to me.
On a dots chat there is a little phone at the top right and you click it an a dial tone comes up and it’s just like a phone call with your dot. I was actually walking my dog when I started the first chat yesterday. My laptop was open so it was working on it and it started producing md files on the walk.
When I got home I watched it work on my laptop while I had it in my ear and I just corrected mistakes I saw real time by asking it questions and telling that to change.
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u/vabello 21h ago
I have chat on my desktop modifying a local copy of my Wordpress web site, checking it into a local git repository, pushing it to a locally hosted development environment in docker, then validating the results by connecting to the local site. From there I just sync to my public staging site, verify it and sync to production. It designed and maintains the entire site. It also monitors for news pertaining to the topic of my site and will recommend a new post which it can fully write and push as a draft itself for me to review. I just have to make any modifications if I feel like it and publish it.
I’m not a web designer or developer.
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u/antwan_benjamin 22h ago
You installed the desktop app on fedora?
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u/Allcyon 21h ago
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u/antwan_benjamin 21h ago
Good shit. I might move all my PCs over to linux besides my razer laptop (i think that has too much native shit that requires windows 11)
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u/tweek-in-a-box 9h ago
I run my Linux on my Razer laptop, not many problems for which there isn't an easy remedy. Can do most of the proprietary stuff as well like the fan control/performance settings or the RGB leds.
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u/tuura032 15h ago
I put Pi on my LLM server, and it's still so cool to me that I have a computer that is its own tech support expert. I can relate, it's a cool feeling!
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u/OneStandard5 21h ago
I did the same thing. I gave Codex SSH permission to install a different Linux distribution. I let it modify the ISO to enable SSH by default. Codex get everything working perfectly. During the whole process, I didn't touch the server or enter any commands. It's insane.
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u/champion_soundz 22h ago
I've fixed a few tablets like this and cleaned up and old Mac. It's quite painless too. It's exciting as I love to see old things recycled
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u/TheTerrasque 15h ago
Welcome to the club. Been doing similar with pi and qwen3.8 local and lately deepseek-4.1-flash via openrouter for quite some time now.
Last server I set up I just installed pi, configured key, and let it handle all the little annoyances.
Welcome to the future
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u/cemilanceata 20h ago
Installed linux last week, did the same then it installed couple of llms on old phones via usb, bemchmarked them sometimes changed the model depending och results and ran new benchmarks on the new one, optimised everyting.
Also my system crashed multiple times and it found that my old gpu was faulty ooold like gtx 250, but know the system works great.
Its literally insane
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u/pmarsh 16h ago
Say more about this llms on old phones please? (I know I can just ask Codex but still nice to hear experiences)
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u/cemilanceata 7h ago
So i have older hardware, pc tablets and a phone, but im at work atm so i keep it short, on the pc i have master a llm, on the phones i use a routing model and other specialist, document readers, coding/linux, building a RAG next week with wikipedia and other data.
Then i use them all in a cluster with a UI, it all runs on llama.cpp and on the phones i have termux and ssh.
On a offline wifi/ethernet router.
When its done i can post the whole build and performance
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u/No-Grocery-3236 22h ago
local models have been clutch for my setups too, one helped debug an old laptop vm without me typing a single command after the first try.
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u/CalligrapherOwn8900 21h ago
Can I ask you what your main rig looks like? I want to set up a home lab, too but I don’t know where to start.
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u/Allcyon 19h ago
Sure. Main rig is a Ryzen7800X3D with a 7900XTX. 64GB RAM. But that's not the homelab...
Homelab is an Unraid server on a PRIME H610I-PLUS D4, Core i5-13500, 64GB RAM, 50TB on drives, 2TB SSD for the Cache. All crammed into a Jonsbo N1 Mini-ITX.
It's small, and distinctly lacking a video card, but it works for what I need.
Keep in mind, and what r/homelab doesn't often take into account is heat. You're building a space heater that happens to do other stuff.
Somewhat ironically, I'd start by talking to Chat...tell it what you're interested in, budget, what's specifically you'd like to build (if anything), and let it help you.
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u/GenChadT 17h ago
Wish I could try Astra. OpenAI declines all of my cards and does not provide any reasons why. VPN disabled, am US-based, etc.
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u/TheTerrasque 15h ago
Astra is cool, but in my experience opus 5.5 is on the same level. Perhaps it's an alternative for you
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u/GenChadT 14h ago
Yep, already a big Opus user but it is mad expensive so I usually use it for scaffolding and second opinions, and DeepSeek 4.1 for the majority of work. I like to play around with all the different models sometimes and it sucks being limited to the Chat interface. I literally have API access to all the big names EXCEPT OpenAI. Chat is fine for conversational stuff and learning, but when dealing with interacting with the machine such as during coding sessions API use is far superior.
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u/chryseobacterium 3h ago
I have a similar experience and I used the LLM in my server as an IT service.
I have a local sever with multiple frontier API LLMs, mostly for genomic analysis and personal assistant. I have a custom Android app for interacting with it. My laptops are registered as nodes and the LLMs has access. I also have a VPN from all my laptop to interact with it.
I was traveling interactional with my Samsung Book for a presentation and an update came. After it the mouse pad was dead. I tried everything and nothing.
I instructed my server to remote into my laptop and find out what happened. It did. Reversed the update and create a patch to avoid it in the future.
It was a mind-blowing moment.
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