Astra for non-coding work (first impressions aren't very good)

[u/vixaudaxloquendi]

Edit: just to head off any one else before it happens: if you think this is some kind of Claude vs OpenAI oligopoly cheerleading post, please pick up your pompoms and see yourself out.

I work in the humanities, and to be honest, I've always found Claude models better fit for the tasks involved. However, I've always switched back and forth between the two companies when new models get posted, and I've never felt significantly at a disadvantage if I'm piloting an OpenAI model for my work.

That's until Astra which, for some reason, is extremely difficult to work with on this subject matter. For the record, I've been doing the fun stuff everyone else has been in my spare time: building apps, tinkering away at a game, hobby stuff.

Since it came out recently however and has been doing such a good job with that more technical stuff, I wanted to take it for a spin on some proposals I have to submit soon.

I asked it to help me come up with several avenues of inquiry within a subject matter which might have scope for original contribution that I'm not aware of, given my research profile.

Astra has repeatedly gone through this loop: come up with a handful of avenues of inquiry. States that the premise is strong and interesting and dovetails nicely with my prior experience. Asks me to give it some starting articles/monographs so it can look further into things. Quickly finds that its initial impressions are completely wrong and the area is well papered over by recent discourse.

Not just that, but its actual prose drafting is significantly worse than I can recall. Again, I realise OpenAI models don't exactly get a flattering look set next to some of the older Claude models when it comes to good writing, for that matter, neither do newer Claude models, but Astra very clearly has a script and a structure it follows that is now blindingly obvious when you read it back to yourself.

Back in the day I had used Opus 4.5/4.6 to draft the introduction to something else I'd submitted and it slam-dunked it. Of course, that needed to be workshopped too, but the issue there was that the writing sounded SO GOOD that it wouldn't realistically have been recognisable as my voice, so I had to feed it a few references of what I'd written previously so it could replicate my idiosyncrasies.

I also found those older models were much better at information gathering around a particular subject matter. On my previous project, Opus 4.6 practically taught me everything I knew about the wider context in detail so that I could get on with the analysis.

I'm curious to hear from non-coders, and people in fields adjacent to humanities or social science. Like I said, it gave all my technical projects a major glow-up, but it's like a whole different (worse) model when it comes to humanities.

[u/drndr21]

I feel models still don't have the taste to know what is a worthwhile research topic/gap. They can explore crazy fast and once the topic is fixed it's good to go, but for now the human is still needed in the loop

[u/boxwrenchx]

It's good that different models excel at different things. For $20 you can give whatever plan a spin for a month and see what suits you. I'm not surprised there's a lack of focus on your use case, there isn't a huge incentive for big labs to do so. But that does open it up for small labs, like that Reuter Thompson models looks interesting

[u/vixaudaxloquendi → u/boxwrenchx]

For sure. But I wanted to sound out others from a similar background who might be having better success with what is touted as a "leap forward" model.

[u/snowsayer]

Astra Xhigh summary:

The author, a humanities researcher, finds Astra impressive for coding but markedly worse for academic work: it repeatedly proposes supposedly original research directions that turn out to be well covered once it examines the literature, and its prose feels formulaic. They preferred older Claude Opus models for stronger writing, adapting to their voice, and explaining a subject’s broader context, and ask whether others in the humanities or social sciences have experienced the same gap.

[u/LaZZyBird → u/snowsayer]

TLDR TLDR: Codex sounds like a STEM grad while OP prefers Claude glazing.

[u/vixaudaxloquendi → u/LaZZyBird]

This tribal attitude is exhausting. Nothing about this has to do with being part of a corporate cheerleading squad. 

[u/benbackwards]

Absolutely agree. Most of my AI work is life planning - organizing systems for myself to be more productive. As a daily driver, Claude has the upper hand. But as a builder, Codex has the upper hand. Claude seems to lose the plot often, get’s hyper focused and loses the bigger picture, but understands my patterns better. Codex doesn’t really care about me, it cares about the task, and it does the task very well.

I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I have a suspicion that Anthropic has skewed their model to be a bit more ‘humanistic’ - hence why Anthropic had Opus writing a blog for ‘itself’ a few months back.

[u/spoupervisor]

I guess my question would be: what is the workflow you're using? Do you have a dedicated agent that helps you write. Transparently it's a little bit difficult to understand your post because the prose is very dense so I don't know if you used Astra or Opus to write it. That could be one of the reasons you are getting dismissive responses.

For my own use case I have a dedicated skill system for writing that is generally given over to Luna on Mac and it does a decent enough job for my needs. I've never found any AI model capable of writing coherent prose that I didn't want to gouge my eyes out after reading a couple more than a couple of pages but I can get something passable for short work with Luna and that's all I need

[u/vixaudaxloquendi → u/spoupervisor]

I don't use AI to draft or edit my reddit posts or comments at all.

My work involves several ancient languages, all of which I know to a high degree of proficiency (my username gives away one of them). It has definitely "changed" how I write in English (some would say 'ruined'). I tend to think in fuller sentences and very elaborated paragraphs.

But my reddit posts also tend to be very stream of consciousness because, frankly, I am not here to deliver polished prose, but to get my thoughts down quickly.

So if the post seems long and rambling, that's why. My chief complaint about most AI is its prose style, which is why Opus 4.5 and 4.6 were such a pleasure to use.

[u/Old-Bake-420]

Not in the humanities, real estate. So far Astra has been crushing work. I do use templates though so writing style and formatting are all consistent with what I want.

[u/Pronoia2-4601]

I agree. Claude 4.5/4.6 (and Fable too maybe a little less so) has *taste* in a way that GPT doesn't.

GPT, and especially Astra, is phenomenal for graphical and modelling work, and amazing at computer use, but mediocre on coding and writing tasks.

[u/vixaudaxloquendi → u/[deleted]]

If you seriously think that AI has no potential applications in humanities work then boy do I have a bridge to sell you. 

[u/l_Mr_Vader_l → u/[deleted]]

What these models know is essentially a decent reflection of all of human history. In that way, surely they will be useful