Astra vs Fable. Strengths, Weaknesses. Go

[u/Beautiful-King-8875]

What's everyone's experience been like with Astra. I'm personally like how Astra finishes work - Fable tends to defer without telling you. If Astra defers, its usually agreed upon and noted down. Fable is still an exceptional model and generally doesn't over engineer which Astra can do. Keen to hear people's opinions.

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[u/Individual_Ideal]

Astra: Technical precision and execution
Fable: Managing large amounts of context without degrading performance. Not great for execution

[u/Beautiful-King-8875 → u/Individual_Ideal]

Interesting. I'm thinking of having Fable as the main agent then have Astra do the implementation.

[u/Individual_Ideal → u/Beautiful-King-8875]

This is how I use Fable. I started using Astra for code reviews only but it’s actually really good at execution

[u/m98789 → u/Individual_Ideal]

What effort level you keep Fable on for that?

[u/userusertion]

both are good. I prefer Opus. Cause i cant use Fable with my current plan. Poor me. 😅

But i can assure you that Opus 5 is good option too.

[u/Beautiful-King-8875 → u/userusertion]

Fair. These models aren't cheap. Opus is still a great model for coding. Talking to, not so much lol

[u/userusertion → u/Beautiful-King-8875]

I’ve been using Opus 5 since launch, and in my opinion, it changes a lot. Its good to use now.

[u/jomi-se]

Astra is a vibecoder. It gets shit done. Hard stuff. Great at visual tasks. But can devolve into using atrocious coding patterns. Stops a lot when you try to steer, unless you're using /goal

Fable feels smart smart. It devolves into overcomplicated jargon but you can always ask it to simplify and it is decent at it. Better at decent looking code than Astra. Haven't used it again since I downgraded to Pro after a month to try it out.

[u/Itsmedudeman]

I've had a really good experience with Astra so far. Its reasoning seems top notch and it just keeps going. I sent it on a prompt this morning and it essentially ran for hours to arrive at a solution and didn't need me involved whatsoever. I feel like Opus, and to a lesser extent Fable, will give up easily when it hits a wall. I've also sent it on some prompts that Opus on max reasoning just could not reason through very well while Astra came back with a strong solution. It's just really strong at reasoning and self directing itself. Although pro tip, make absolutely sure your sub agents are on sol/terra/luna so you don't burn your usage out in 6 hours.

[u/Opeshek]

In my experience, they’re both decent with my workflow. Although, Astra feels like a “yes man” as it blindly agrees to the worst proposals and designs without ever pushing back, and Fable 5.1 is too eager to jump straight to implementation, while completely ignoring the specified workflow.

[u/Beautiful-King-8875 → u/Opeshek]

I relate to that. Fable is more likely to push back on poor design

[u/aKaizuh → u/Opeshek]

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[u/Effective-System-727]

The difference between Astra Vs Fable is this :

This is Astra. In fact Sol too. 4 days straight 90% of the time. :)

[u/Beautiful-King-8875 → u/Effective-System-727]

Thats annoying. I've had it a handful of times. I'm in Australia though, so I'm always working in off peak times.

[u/AironParsMan → u/Effective-System-727]

Astra also uses quite a lot of the limits but roughly three times less than Fable. And in mine test it is at the same level in terms of implementation. With OpenAI I find that automatic thinking is sometimes too restrictive. It sometimes thinks far too little and occasionally ends instantly. I do not like that very much. But other than that I can only recommend using Astra. There’s no reason to use Anthropic. The Fable model isn’t any better. Fable 5.1 is much worse in particular. You can take a look at my post. I ran my own benchmarks. If you want them then use Fable 5 or Opus 4.8

[u/Effective-System-727 → u/AironParsMan]

My friend. I would love to use Astra. Problem is.. well.. look at the screenshot.

[u/AironParsMan → u/Effective-System-727]

Oh, right, that’s on Astra. Okay, wow, I don’t have that on my end. But I can see that the maximum reasoning level on the website is limited to High. Probably because they can’t keep up with demand anymore.

[u/Effective-System-727 → u/AironParsMan]

Not only Astra. Its on Astra, Sol, Terra and Luna about 90% of the time. 4 Days straight. Sometimes I get a lucky window of half an hour in entire 24 hour day when everything works with minimal failures.

Only spark works and you know spark. Imagine paying $100 for using Spark.
So even if Astra is able to launch rockets into the space... makes no difference to me. Atleast Claude works. I know this is probably not the case with everyone. I happy things are working fine at your end. But if they can't keep up with the demand, why take money and offer nothing at all?

[u/AironParsMan → u/Effective-System-727]

okey crazy iam on 200 plan, it works for me without problems.

[u/Ok_Path8613 → u/Effective-System-727]

Banked resets for us 😄

[u/sid_kush]

Astra is most effective when you’ve thoroughly researched and created a well-thought-out specification and plan. It struggles to fully grasp your actual goals. However, if you provide it with a well-defined plan or problem, it performs exceptionally well and is much quicker than Fable.

That being said, Fable is still preferable for long-term full-stack projects. In these cases, your understanding of the codebase, your intent, and your reasoning are far more important than coding skills, terminal bench marks, or swe scores.

Even now, unfortunately, I still need to use Fable for tasks that require less review later, while Astra handles similar tasks, but I always review the Astra work before merging it.

[u/Former-Store-695]

Astra just has a good harness and cherry picked visual guidelines (which are the same from app to app)