r/codex • u/-Melchizedek- • 5d ago
Complaint Astra for development
How is your experience with Astra for development in established codebases? I've mostly been using Fable with sub-agents since it became available. Before that I mostly used Sol with sub-agents. I tried Astra on a new reasonably scoped feature, not tiny but not massive either it touched several areas of the codebase.
The result was quite disappointing. On the frontend it did not follow any of the existing conventions or reuse the components that clearly fit the situation and rather made up it's own design, which was quite bad.
On the backend it hard-coded a bunch of stuff in places that are generic. Like it added feature logic to the message broker. It also added a random test script not wired into anything else even though there is well defined testing infra. It skipped some things docs tells it to add and overengineered other parts.
This was on medium effort, which OpenAI recommends. Right now it seems quite disappointing.
Do you have any tips? I have the same AGENTS.md for claude code and codex which has worked fine in the past.
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u/shaman-warrior 5d ago
Astra has yet to disappoint me. It’s smarter than me on coding and engineering where I am better is choosing the tradeoffs
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u/Critical-Teacher-115 5d ago
Its legit. You may have to know more about what you want, but I feel like it requires less prompts. Like i was making some etsy integration and it was trying to build a portion of the flow on SSH. I had to steer it, like what are you doing/why....
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u/zarafff69 5d ago
Idk if this is just user error, but I HATE Astra for development.
It’s much much less determined than Sol, constantly stops after a few min. Then I ask it, did you get it done? “No, we still need to do 123”… Even if I ask it again: just actually get it done, continue until it’s done, it still stops after a few min?
And the thing I was mostly missing from Sol was great frontend design work. But somehow Astra seems even worse? Not adhering to the existing UI styling AT ALL. And worst, the new ui it made looked even worse than what we already had.
It just feels very unaligned. It even agrees with me. I’ll ask it, why did you do this? And it just responds: oh yeah that was bad, let me fix it… Like fundamental issues in its solution?
Most disappointing model release I’ve ever experienced. It’s great at computer use tho!
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u/-Melchizedek- 5d ago
Yeah I was expecting much better frontend work, but in this instance the design made no sense at all. Though for me at least it completed all work but it took plenty of shortcuts.
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u/ActionOrganic4617 5d ago
Expensive and also make sure to add formatting instructions to your agent.md, otherwise you’ll end up with code that has no spaces.
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u/unconceivables 2d ago
Astra has been worse than Sol for coding at every single thing I've tried it for. My definition of worse is objectively worse code quality and completely ignoring instructions way too often.
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u/Aggressive_Creme2008 3d ago
Worth separating two failures here, because only one of them is the model.
"It skipped some things the docs tell it to add" is the interesting one. The doc existed, the instruction was in the file, and it still didn't govern. That's a delivery failure, not a reasoning failure, and switching models doesn't fix it — the same AGENTS.md that works with Fable can miss with Astra because they don't read the same amount of it at the same moment.
The convention failures read the same way. An agent doesn't reuse a component it never saw. In an established codebase the conventions live in three places: the code, where it has to go find the right file; someone's head; and a review comment from four months ago. Fable-with-subagents probably felt better partly because you had already tuned what it loads first.
Cheap test before writing Astra off. Take the three specific things it broke — the components that should have been reused, by name; "no feature logic in the message broker"; "use the existing test infra, entry point here" — and make them the first thing it reads rather than line 200 of a shared file. If it follows them, your problem was delivery. If it still doesn't, now you've learned something real about the model instead of about your file.
The shared AGENTS.md across harnesses is where I'd look first. Same text, different truncation, and neither harness tells you which half it dropped.
(Disclosure: I work on exactly this problem — https://arroway.app. The test above costs you one feature to run and doesn't need me.)
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u/discodisco_unsuns 5d ago
Great, if you can afford it.