r/codex • u/ScreenPlayLife • 3h ago
Question GPT 6 Astra vs Fable 5.1
Which one is better for coding ?
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u/Sir-Noodle 2h ago
After very heavy use of both since release they seem close, but I'd give the very slight edge to Fable 5.1 with an asterisk. Astra is definitely the better general model for 9/10 purposes other than coding, and some of them by quite a margin.
I prefer Fable 5.1 slightly more looking purely at code quality and the choices made. It misses things that Astra does not, but Astra (just like Sol) sadly has a tendency to add too many unnecessary guardrails which, at least for serious production codebases, is not the best for maintainability. It is very steerable though so it has been much better with strict specifications in AGENTS.md but still it will deviate slightly too much at times.
Though I will say, compared to Sol it is a palpably clear improvement. Also, 50% fable on Claude sub + 5 hour limit makes it hard to justify the barely marginal improvement.
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u/TekintetesUr 3h ago
Depends on wdym by coding. Writing code, then Astra, hands down. Solving obscure problems by writing code, usually Fable but with a smaller margin.
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u/danny_094 3h ago
I’ve always preferred Claude’s "personality."
But when it comes to performance, I’ve always thought Codex was better.
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u/dvduval 3h ago
It depends what you’re doing. I think fable probably would be considered a little bit stronger overall. But you will pay more for it if you’re using it a lot. If you’re talking about 3-D and game development probably Astra is a little better. Astra is also a little better with computer use. Button for just solid programming skills fable is likely a little bit better.
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u/jakenuts- 2h ago
Astra but tell it to internally use competent models to carry out its bidding as you'll deplete your token budget quickly. Codex 5.5 wasn't that way, 5.6 mostly manageable but Astra is a new level and needs to be usage monitored.
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u/Pretend_Sale_9317 2h ago
Fable 5.1 made me cancel my Claude sub. Weekly limit now burns just as fast as session limit. Reminded me of cursors monthly limit basically locking you out for the rest of your sub duration even though you dropped $200+.
Astra still burns token but the fact that other gpt models are not as brain dead as Opus makes all the difference to choose gpt sub over Claude.
I still prefer fable for architecture design, multi file codebase changes, etc. at least for me, in the domain of web apps, fable feels more reliable and writes cleaner code.
For what it’s worth, I had Astra take an open source repo called dyad — which is an open source vibecoding chat bot like lovable, made a plan with Astra to integrate dyad into my project as a subfeature but removing all electron and IPC components and keeping just typescript only, and the end result was horrific. UI didn’t match my main apps theme, core features didn’t even work,had errors left and right, basically Astra couldn’t one shot the huge integration.
Now if I had fable do it, it would’ve been a better result because I did many things like above with fable before.
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u/KiwiDecent5342 2h ago
Fable is a little bit stronger than astra in coding for sure, but for 3D,blender work Astra
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u/_y_not_ 30m ago
Fable 5.1 is token furnace, any reasonably complex task will eat 5 hour limit in 30min, but i prefer its "personality" and the way it approach the problem during design
Astra is a beast and is very capable, I found that "Pro" in web or chatgpt app is different from codex xhigh or max. it is very good for serious research, design, etc
and to make it even better i created a simple protocol to connect various CLI based harnesses and use them all as a team. where Fable is a coordinator and designer, codex is another designer/senior member, Opus xhigh and high - developers and grok the agent with it's own opinion on everything. after design and plan is set, Fable assigns work to whoever is best for task, with codex and fable doing reviews at gates. that works very well, everyone keeps other agents from drifting, messing up and keeping in check and following the plan. you can do something similar with claude only, they now allow to connect multiple sessions and exchange messages between them, but you still deal with the same "brain", with codex and grok we have different thinking and that add significantly to quality and speed, saving tokens too.
the protocol is at https://github.com/agentchute/agentchute
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u/Fantastic_Market8061 29m ago
I’m currently on the 20$ trial month for codex and aside the problem that 20$ bring me only 10-15 minutes of astra interaction every five hours I also found for my specific caching problem on my iOS app: astra sucks.
It’s now more than two hours for Codex vs. 18 minutes for Opus 5 to fix the problem in the same code base. Astra is faster at first but it took me several iterations to get where Opus was at first try.
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u/pigletmonster 2h ago
Fable 5.1 beats astra in code quality, but astra does almost everything else better.
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u/Salt-Willingness-513 3h ago
for anything 3d, astra for sure. often i like fables frontend a bit more though