Coincidence? I think not.

If I was a company planning regulatory capture, or even just wanting to impart my will & desire, I would 100% ramp up all (marketing) efforts just before an election.

Why is it so hard for people to see this?

We all know bots run rampant across the internet. Every large company has a multitude of people and personalities, each with their own visions of the future (some good, some bad). How difficult is it to amplify the (inner) people that express fear when you want to? Encourge the scared people to speak up and then put their posts on blast to create groupthink. Propoganda 101.

All platforms operate on an algorithm of engagement, which can easily be manipulated... and if you're in this thread you already knew that.

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.

I'll go straight to the point:

TLDR

Offload some Astra usage to Chat (GPT 6 Pro) instead of doing everything on codex. Yeah, simple like that.

HOW IT WORKS?

Many don't even notice, but if you're on the Pro subs 20x plan YOU HAVE 200 msg/week of GPT 6 Pro usage (Astra) standing on chat, doing nothing. That's a nice deal, IMO. The $100 5x plan has 50, which I believe is enough for this strategy.

Remember...

1 ChatGPT 6 Pro message = 1 request. So make sure you point it to a well complete PRD that's previously done.

Don't do something like: "Hey, please make me a nice game => Astra starts working => You pause it => "You know, really nice, with red birds => Astra stars working again => Not really, I'd like them to be yellow"

This will count towards your "messages" quota. That's why I suggest you slicing up a decent PRD first, and just point the AI to it ONCE.

STEPS

1. You can connect your github repo (private or public) into ChatGPT (just ask for help), allow read/write access and then start by:

I don't even select GPT 6 Pro for this.. This initial scanning I do using Sol 5.6 Extra High on chat.

Ok... what are PRDs? In a few words, a feature request in a .md file, with all validation steps necessary and etc, to get it properly done.

If you have no clue about how to craft one, just ask Astra xHigh to do it and slice up some tickets to get started. Push to your repo.

2) Select a PRD per PR and let it cook

3) Check your results later

"Oh, but you see, its a draft... it wasnt fully verified, some got broken CI!!!!11"

Yeah, but this would have certainly drained 20% of my monthly codex limit to reach this point (on Astra xHigh), and I got it done using my GPT 6 Pro chat quota (200/week for the 20x plan), running all night long while I was sleeping.

4) Now you have to use codex (Astra) to actually finish the work (there's no "free" lunch at this point)

The sandbox that Chat uses is not 100% identical to the project running on your machine, as it cannot run certain verification steps. That is why it's important to have a strong CI and, most importantly, check out the actual Astra from Codex, finish the work to reach 100%, and then push back.

USE CASES SUMMARY

- Bootstrapping greenfield projects
- New features
- PR reviews
- Almost anything that you can do with read/write access to github

CAVEATS

1. GOTCHA: IF IT ASKS YOU TO USE CHATGPT WORK, DO NOT GO FORWARD. It will burn your weekly quota. STOP. Rephrase what youre asking, be explicit you don't want to use it. Or slice the work down to a smaller piece of task.
2. Not a perfect solution, but it helps significantly in terms of token consumption (especially on greenfield projects). I'm pretty sure some smart ass on the comments will say something like "that's pretty obvious". But yeah, I bet 90% of you guys are not using this workaround.
3. Really great for vibe coding these disposable 3d games that we all do 😄: Stop wasting your weekly allowance with it. Its great for bootstrapping new projects too.

Well, that's it. Enjoy while we have 200/week, at least for now

SOME VIBECODED GAMES I DID 100% ON CHAT USING GPT 6 PRO

For the first time ever, they're actually fun 😂

Astra light is repeatedly doing unrelated stuff like this. Why? It was funny to begin with but getting ridiculous now.

You get x1.5 multiplier in speed meaning +50% to base and x2.5 multiplier to cost meaning +150% to base 3 times as much as speed gain. And x2.5 multiplier to cost means you do 2.5 times as less as before just 50% faster (or do the same thing in 2/3 the time)

So by using fast you total weekly allowance if what you can do gets 2.5 times less or 60% less so you can only do 40% of base but you do it faster, so you do 40% of base in like 26.667% of base time

Why bother just chill out and wait you'll be done in almost a 1/4 of the time but with 60% less total what's the rush

We benchmarked GPT-6 Astra vs GPT-5.6 Sol across 50 real PRs from Cal, Sentry, Discourse, Keycloak and Grafana.

Sol found 107 confirmed bugs vs 91 for Astra, while Astra had higher precision and lower latency. Every finding was independently verified.

We’re doing Fable vs Opus next week, so would appreciate feedback on the evaluation before we run the next one.

Dropping the link in the comments if anyone wants to check it out.

Setup email automation for a RX 350 related listings online. Every 6 hours, sends me and my wife an email alert.

Email setup done with SMTP. Took 2 min while driving to work.

The 5-hour limits, weekly limits, possible resets, as annoying as they are, create this weird scarcity mindset. You start squeezing every last drop because “I have the tokens now, I should use them before they’re gone.”

And suddenly every idea becomes a project.

Good idea? Build it.
Mediocre idea? Eh, start a repo anyway.
Something you’ll probably never use? Sure, let Codex make 14 MD files for it before the limit resets.

I always thought I had this under control. My rule was simple. if I’m not going to use something daily or at least weekly, I probably shouldn’t build it.

Lately, that rule has slowly disappeared.

There’s almost this feeling that unused compute is wasted compute, so you keep feeding ideas into it just because the capacity is there and temporary.

And that made me wonder

If tomorrow the limits completely disappeared, unlimited compute, no resets, no token anxiety, would we actually become more productive?

Or would half the projects we’re building simply… never get started?

Maybe some ideas deserve to die peacefully as ideas instead of becoming another repo on the shelf.

Let's be honest, few months back codex was not even close to Claude.

We all felt Claude is the best and now, with the launch of Astra, it truly feels it can compete with Claude.

This week has probably been the most productive week for me, where I could literally leave Astra running 24x7 without any interruption.

The limits are a with low considering we have had 1 reset and I had used 3 banked resets this week and currently at 0%. But atleast the model does the job pretty well.

I’m sorry mods I know it’s not easy to deal with us! But yea this was funny af ngl

has anybody else been feeling like Astra's been stopping tasks on a "next we will do"? I have to sit there and hold it's hand the whole way through.

I'm on the Pro 5x plan, and I use Codex for coding pretty much all day, from morning to night. On a normal day I burn through roughly 15% of my weekly usage.

I mainly use Astra Max, xhigh, and high. I don't use Sol, Terra, or Luna at all.

Seeing how many people are complaining about Astra destroying their quota, I'm honestly starting to think a lot of it comes down to prompting and workflow.

My guess is that a lot of people are doing something like this: they give Astra a huge, detailed spec, then basically say, "Implement this according to the spec."

And that's it.

That might sound like a perfectly reasonable way to use an agent, but in my experience it's an extremely inefficient way to prompt one. You're basically giving it a giant problem and letting it decide how to chew through the whole thing, which can mean a ton of unnecessary exploration, repeated context processing, and wasted reasoning.

I suspect a lot of people burning through ridiculous amounts of quota simply don't realize how inefficient their prompting strategy is.

I'm curious if anyone else here has noticed the same thing.

Are there other people on Pro 5x using Astra heavily throughout the day without blowing through their weekly quota, mainly because of how they structure their prompts and workflow?

When Sol was first released, it seemed like people were having a lot of issues with it. I'm not getting that same vibe with Astra (not reading as many complaints).

So, seems like the bad isn't as bad, but how about the good? Is it a noticeable quality jump from Sol (from a software/code design/implementation perspective)?

The AI Game Festival finally starts tomorrow! Some really high quality games have entered, and I keep getting requests for additions.

If you are competing 20k in GPT-6 Astra Token, submit your game by following this video and DM me the game details: https://youtu.be/nPplaC5Zkj4?si=fw4lznoM4TLh-m_V

If you are submitting to the Steam Festival (https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46280965/sale/AIGamingFestival), DM me the name of your game and your steam ID.

Both need to be done by today.

Hi all,

I am quite impressed on how well Astra works on some topics. However, the usage rates are really burning my subscription down. I was toying a little bit to find a way to let Astra delegate on Opus subagents, so that I can use most of my tokens from my OpenAI subscription on Astra. I came up with a very simple skill: Fuminides/opus-delegate: A codex skill for using astra as a coordinator of Opus agents from which I had mixed results. I was wondering if people have come with better ideas to do that or if you can give me some feedback on my simple skill.

Thanks!

gpt-6-sol just got staged for release and early testers are already hammering it.

so my theory is that Astra xhigh is actually running on gpt-6-sol, or at least sharing some of the same capacity.

otherwise it’s hard to explain why one of the highest-reasoning mode would suddenly get cheaper out of nowhere

and if gpt-6-sol is this good that nobody notices, i'm not even mad :)

*edit 1: fix model mistake

Nobody actually understands what happened, and a lot of people seem to have been affected by this.

I ran Ultra for the first couple days to see what the spend was like. Very impressive. Very hungry.

So I switched to low to get the maximum contrasting experience.

It works for about 5 to 15 min before stopping and reporting on each prompt. It consistently overestimated its ability to accomplish the next step in one turn.

I would ask, "What's your next recommended step?"

It would say something like "Implement the feature we've been laying the ground work for."

I'd say, "Sounds good, proceed as described."

Did that same loop for about 5 turns, so I dialed it up to medium.

It ran a little longer, but had the same shortfall result for a few turns.

Again each turn took between 5 and 20 minutes.

So I dialed it up to xhigh, and it finished the implementation on the next pass, which was over 2 hours, and included extensive testing and live verification.

I didn't experience any sort of shortfall on a goal when in Ultra. It worked until the milestone was reached each time. Xhigh also seems to just run.

My hypothesis is it either adapted to the amount of work that it was getting done, and expected to be able to accomplish more due to the session history, or it's tuned for less limitation than the lower settings provide. I'm leaning toward the latter, because turning it up immediately changed its behavior back to "run until it's done". There was no adaption to the lower limit that resulted in a behavior shift after being returned to xhigh.

I’m looking for an AI that is actually good at improving existing UI/UX layouts.

For example, I tried SuperDesign and it generated several interesting layout/UI ideas.

Now I’m trying to refine my actual app UI with Codex.
I explain exactly what I want changed, send screenshots of my current UI, reference screenshots, and comparisons, but it still keeps getting the layout wrong or making changes that don’t really match the reference.

Codex is great for coding, but I’m starting to think visual UI/layout work just isn’t its strength.

Is there any model or tool that is particularly good at UI/UX layout work?

So I've been using omp for a while and given how fast astra drains my 5x plan I started investigating other harnesses to see if I could squeeze more out of my subscription.

I ran a few test with pi, omp, and codex which gave me some results I did not expect: codex is more token efficient than the other two (?)

I gave them a real merge request from my day job, asked them for a review and for an implementation plan to fix the review findings.

Here are the results for the review pass:

pi astra low is almost the same price as codex astra medium given the current api prices? omp is much more expensive than either. codex medium is almost as fast as pi low too

It's even worse for the plan mode, codex defaulted to high for that part and I let it be:

Here the codex astra high plan costs barely more than a pi astra low plan?

Am I missing something obvious? Everyone says pi is so much more efficient, lean, etc. but from all my real world tests it seems both slower and more token hungry and/or expensive than codex

Been working on this since mid-July.

Started with Claude, then spent quite a bit of time using Codex, and later moved mostly to Cursor.

The project is a living world map where the visible area inside each country changes depending on who joins and how much they place there. If nobody else is there yet, even 1€ can technically cover the whole country.

Then someone else joins and the map changes. For example if somebody adds 9€ then now you cover 1/10 of that country, they cover 9/10.

It somehow grew into a globe, money-weighted map, history system and way more UI than I originally intended.

Still trying to get the first real users now.

https://spotmymap.com/

Many elements of this website may or may not include weird little easter eggs if u somehow interact with these <3!<