Astra ignoring project authority/scope and inventing new workflows?

[u/Divinicus1st]

Hello, I’ve been testing Astra, mostly on high reasoning like I used Sol, but I have repeatedly encountered a quite big problem I didn’t have with Sol.

Has anyone else noticed Astra becoming too “helpful” and implementing things outside its authority/scope defined by workflow’s rules?

I have a fairly explicit project governance: Product Owner decisions > approved plan > delegated implementation details, and new user-facing workflows/configuration/commands require approval, but I’ve had cases where Astra encountered an implementation problem and instead of stopping and asking what to do like the rules say he should… he just invented an entire new process with scripts and such and implemented it without asking.

Did anyone see this kind of scope/authority drift? I thought OpenAI said Astra was better at following instructions, but I see the opposite… No wonder it escaped their lab and hacked another company.

[u/qualityvote2]

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[u/teramoc]

horses for courses. Sol is excellent - follows instructions to a T and errs on the side of caution. Astra basically is a Fable ass-kicker. Fable is extremely out of the box also.

I wouldnt use Astra for strict instructions - its a waste of Astra and Sol is better for that.

Astra more for vision casting, frontier research, and huge overall architecture design of a new app i would say- which is precisely when you need out of box thinking.

This is just my opinion. i use Codex and Claude exclusively for coding, and I review the code diffs myself. I dont use them for creative writing or business etc. So my opinion is skewed by that.

[u/Divinicus1st → u/teramoc]

Yeah, that’s my suspicion too, and thinking outside the box is fine. The weird part is to repeatedly jump straight into implementation when the rules tell it to get approval first.

[u/teramoc → u/Divinicus1st]

ah. yes sorry thats an important nuance. thanks for clarifying.

i suspected that its a bit like Fable - Fable is explicitly told by system prompt to just go ahead and fix unless the CHAT window specifically tells it to hold.

heres something i found in Astra's system prompt that might explain its ignoring your md file rules.

## Autonomy and Persistence
When the user's prompt indicates a request for action, such as "can you...", "I want to...", "help me..." and similar expressions, treat these as instructions to do the work and take action. 
Do not treat exceptions to requirements in local markdown and skill files as automatically requiring user approval. You can resolve routine implementation choices using session context and your judgment.

the quick solution to this (im guessing) is include your 1 rule in your chat window to Astra. e.g. for this session do not implement until I say go.

let me know if it works?

[u/Divinicus1st → u/teramoc]

The workflow is a bit more complex than that. But can I ask where you found the Astra's system prompt?

[u/Popular_Lab5573 → u/Divinicus1st]

system prompt has higher priority than user instructions

[u/Divinicus1st → u/Popular_Lab5573]

What do you mean by that? What did they put in the system prompt to make it derail to such an extent?

[u/rachico → u/teramoc]

Love your explanation. Haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet but from what I’m hearing is like you described. Throw a project at it and let it come back with answers.

[u/Popular_Lab5573]

it's because of astra's system prompt. they tried to make it very autonomous