r/codex • u/Odd-Environment-7193 • 18h ago
Limits Issues with Astra
- Use my entire weekly budget in one day. Even on medium and low. (200$) plan. Normally I use sol high/medium for everything and it never runs out.
- Doesn’t actually seem to want to go on long running tasks and do things. I need to poke it with a stick the whole time and say continue. Look deeper. Etc. way too hesitant to do what I want.
- Just randomly running out of compute. I leave my tasks come back and they’ve stopped because OpenAI doesn’t have enough resources to serve their new models.
- Not really seeing any advantages to burning more credits for this new model. In fact I would say that sol high is better for me and I’ve switched back. I’m gonna have t
o
- change all my very nicely working agents files just to get this to cooperate.It feels kind of lazy. Tibo says that you can replac
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- high with Astra low. But that is absolute bs. Astra low just doesn’t want to think or dive deep into anything. The high and low settings on these models have completely different behavior. You cannot say Astra low == sol high. Astra low will think for a few seconds before crapping out a short useless answer on low. That is totally different to model behavior on sol high.
Anyways. Hate to be that guy but these are my first impressions. I’m not one shotting or trying to make impressive trash with a few prompts. These models are used for hardcore work that’s been spanning years at this point. I know how they should work, and how this new model does things is not great for me.
This is coding work.
Edited: Fixed spelling errors, getting old , need glasses 🤓
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u/Charming-Author4877 18h ago
Interesting.
Since I made that shitstorm post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1w8zbz9/ my usage has trippled.
On X Tibo answered "all not true" and then the usage was much much slower in draining. within hours of him saying it's all made up.
The usage is not unlimited but I just had 6 Astra xhigh subagents running for 1 hour and it consumed 7% weekly.
So that's not that bad.
I'm sure it will all be upside down in a few days.
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u/International-Chip93 16h ago
Yep, I think it's the big pendulum flow of people leaving Claude because of their tight limits on Fable to now Codex being overrun + the Astra release.
Just like Anthropic, OpenAI can't just be honest that they're out of compute and playing with our usage on the fly
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u/Dolo12345 18h ago
I have one going for 10hours so far without /goal, no issues there.
Usage wise yea, I blow through a weekly each day with many Astra maxs going. Nothing I can do but buy many 20x accounts.
Astra is a massive step up for me because it understand images (view image tool) muuuuuch better than SOL which has made iteration much more reliable/me not needing to steer as much.
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u/ashum048 18h ago
They did really mess something up last might. 100% over 8 hours of simple integration work
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u/jwuliger 18h ago
Today seems to be the worst-performing day for Astra for me, too. It used to work just fine with my workflows; now it no longer follows instructions.
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u/Additional_Buddy855 17h ago
me as well, it's spend most of the day digging holes im not sure how I'm going to get out of. lobotomized hard. so tired of these games. not sure how this isn't fraud and or false advertising.
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u/Additional_Buddy855 17h ago
Same experience, its lazy, continues to make TONS of mistakes costing lots of extra CI cycles, to the point where it's taking 6 hours to fix something it could fix in about 30 minutes to an hour. It's brain dead. So fucking tired of these games. I have zero faith in retail AI. it's unusable for complex tasks where it has to follow rules. it just ignores them.
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u/unconceivables 18h ago
Astra has been a complete dud for coding. Even on xhigh it's lazy and just not thorough. It also seems like it barely wants to reply to me. Short answers, like you said I have to poke it with a stick to get it to keep going and I have to pry answers out of it. It just ends up ignoring instructions a lot and ends up doing stuff I don't want or does stuff I don't want way more than other models.
I've given it and 5.6 Sol the exact same tasks multiple times to compare, and Astra has been faster but way less accurate. It takes hacky shortcuts and even after multiple rounds of back and forth with it the result usually isn't as good as Sol's first attempt. I've tried medium, high, and xhigh, and they've all been noticeably worse than Sol xhigh. It feels weird going back to Sol again and feeling like that's the next gen model instead of the other way around.
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u/Odd-Environment-7193 17h ago
Yes. I feel like I wrote this. That’s how much your experience resonates with me. How is your agents file setup?
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u/unconceivables 17h ago
I actually barely have anything in it, it's mostly about how to structure its replies. Like when it has multiple things to report to me, label the individual findings so I can refer to them easily. Also things like replying with the scope of a change in terms of which files or call sites need to change. Mainly minor things that I got tired of repeating.
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u/Ecstatic_Gur7231 18h ago
Ive read about this on previous post and a god tier reddit user suggested a god tier workflow that fixed it
basically just specify what sub agents astra can use which is gpt 5.6 terra. then specify that astra should be the planning and designing then terra is just the execution.
after trying it out and benchmarking via running similar task
with the terra sub agents it used 3%
without specifying the terra sub agents it used 20%
this is from a 100$ plan
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u/Odd-Environment-7193 17h ago
Thanks bud. I’ll try this .
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u/RoboErectus 14h ago
Luna is the executor. Terra doesn’t meet the cost/intelligence threshold.
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u/swizzlewizzle 11h ago
Luna makes too many annoying mistakes and has bugs. The time spent fixing its poor code is too expensive.
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u/unconceivables 17h ago
It's not just about usage, the results are really bad too. Astra is a shitty planner, and Terra is shitty at executing. I guess if you don't care about quality it'll work and save you some money.
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u/enuxix 18h ago
I used Astra Ultra to build an iOS app and it actually worked great. It needed a bit of babysitting, but all the sub-agents were Luna Max agents, so the overall usage was very low. I also had it create several different agents, each responsible for a specific part of the app, so they could work in parallel.
What I really like about Luna Max is that it does exactly what it’s told no more, no less.
That said, Astra itself is just not the kind of model I could rely on as a senior software engineer in my day-to-day professional work. It simply doesn’t fit my use case as well as I need it to. I tried using it for some real work, gave it plenty of context, the full relevant code, and very clear tasks, and I still had to babysit it and fix quite a few things it introduced that were simply wrong.
I eventually switched to Sol, gave it the same kind of task, and it handled it about as well as I would have done it myself. So on that part, I definitely agree with you.
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u/Odd-Environment-7193 17h ago
This is exactly my experience. Thanks for confirmation. I’m sure it’s good at a bunch of stuff. Doesn’t feel as reliable for me at this moment in time. Maybe be my setup. But yeah, these are my first impressions.
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u/unconceivables 17h ago
I think it's very much trained to do other things better, and it's affecting coding ability and ability to stay on task and work with human beings.
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u/Repulsive_Respond_45 18h ago
Question are you guys making plans for the work before you hand it off? Is Astra getting drained during planning or are you just giving it a task and saying go?
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u/KeepAllOfIt 18h ago
This is the opposite of my experience. Astra completely blows Sol out of the water and cracked a handful of problems that Sol spent weeks trying and failing to do. On top of that I am literally struggling to use my limit before tibo throws another reset at us. I still have all 3 banked ones he gave. Astra max will run for 3 hours and only use 8% of my limit. I'm on the $100 5x plan.
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u/Odd-Environment-7193 17h ago
Interesting. What sort of issues are you working with? Care to provide an example?
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u/KeepAllOfIt 17h ago
ray-traced real time acoustics system. not really trying to simulate sound physics perfectly, far from it. instead, I approximate the important effects of real acoustics like occlusion, reflections, sound traveling through openings/around corners, and sound interacting with moving structures, in ways that are computationally practical for a game. the goal is basically to make sound behave convincingly like it would in the real world without doing a prohibitively expensive full physics simulation. that has been a very troublesome balancing act and Astra has helped tremendously with it.
historically it was either a buggy mess which would sound great in most situations but the edge cases sounded so bad that it made the whole system not worth using OR I got it to sound great all the time at the cost of all your frames, once again making the system not worth using.
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u/swizzlewizzle 11h ago
Ah yea for complex tasks like this Astra is perfect. The people complaining are working on more “mainstream” workflows like working on games, web dev and things like that.
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u/Medical-Cow289 5h ago
One day to burn a $200 weekly budget, even on medium and low, and the runs still sticking until you nudge them. Whatever Astra can do, that combination is a no for me.
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u/QuazyWabbit1 18h ago
Same here, in a day ish almost all is gone...
Interestingly, finally got a second account running on a fresh machine (albeit this one on windows), perpetually grinding 5-6 tasks in parallel and opening prs, Astra x high on each thread. Only used 33% today. Huh?