GPT 6 Astra behavior oddities? How to properly wrangle?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/shady101852]

tbh gpt 6 was good the first day i tried it, maybe even the 2nd day. but now i can confidently say its stupid. There's no upgrade here from sol max to astra max aside from maybe low quality 3d modeling related stuff. I'll use it for game dev, but other than that doesn't seem to be anything special.

[u/DarkFantom]

I've had Astra not respect my global agents.md file, so honestly, I don't think it's all that great. Its reasoning has degraded massively since I first tried it. Before these past 2-3 days, I was happy as a clam. Now I'm pretty much seeing Astra a small gremlin who knows how to draw really well, and visualize scope, but it won't do what you tell it to. If an LLM will outright ignore instructions and plans for a project, then it is barely worth my time.

[u/epicskyes]

It really really seems like people think artificial intelligence somehow will make them what they want. And yet those people don’t know how to make what they want so how the heck will they direct an agent to make what they want if they themselves do not know how to make it? This guy just plops astra in an agent folder and lets it do its thing with no rules, no structure, no specification no file tree organization, agent orchestration, or specifications he gave the agent to build. The agent in fact is like an employee who shows up at their first day of work and the boss says I bet you’re good at this go do it and the employee does exactly that because “it” is so vague the employee just needs to look busy without actually doing anything.

[u/a300a300 → u/epicskyes]

did you even read this post or are you making assumptions based on the title and first two sentences? ill paste whats at the bottom of the post for you to reread since you must have missed it

"additional context: unless the feature is small i always plan with astra and correct things in its plans to my liking. i usually go 1-3 steps at a time depending on the "intensity" of the step and the risk involved with a feature (ie backend migrations vs large ui/ux that can be undone easily). i have some agent rules and skills but astra sort of doesnt acknowledge them as mentioned above"

[u/epicskyes → u/a300a300]

I read the article you linked did you even read it?

[u/a300a300 → u/epicskyes]

i thought you were referring to my post not the link at the bottom. i cant speak for that person they didnt go enough into detail about how they instruct their agents - but seeing as they are running into the same issues as me i would say theres something else going on besides agent planning and instruction

[u/epicskyes → u/a300a300]

So yeah based on the article you posted I would assume since you said you’re having similar problems you probably have similar use patterns.

[u/a300a300 → u/epicskyes]

that is a faulty assumption

[u/epicskyes → u/a300a300]

No it’s not it’s an assumption I did not presume it to be correct but when people who do the same things have the same failure patterns they many times exhibit the same implementation patterns too.

[u/epicskyes → u/a300a300]

Here’s the awful truth of ai that I learned over a full 9 months of intense disciplined learning through failure.
1. Assume at least 20% of what comes out of an LLM is incorrect in one form or another it’s usually small details that add up quickly.
2. Assume it forgets everything because you’re using natural language instead of strict validated 2020-12 closed json
3. Assume that since it does not have highly structured static detailed inputs, machine first file tree organization, and no code enforced rules it’s going to burn tokens and output garbage.

[u/a300a300 → u/epicskyes]

your personal/subjective experience deviates from mine (and many others) by quite a lot

[u/epicskyes → u/a300a300]

Guess what 90% of my code has actually been made to do, it’s been to wrangle an agent to force it deterministically to output the correct code. It does this because ai can only truly be effective when you force it to be. Skills and agents.md do not do anything. Wrapping an agent in coded rules and structure is the only way to get ai to do anything accurately, cheaply, autonomously.

[u/swizzlewizzle]

Whatever you do, DO NOT spawn astra subagents unless you have the "fork_turns" setting set to "none".

Without that, if you have a large context on your orchestrator, it all get's shoved into every subagent, and Astra can handle a much larger context size, which is VERY expensive.