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Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

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Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#11

Post by Dlemlo »

"But for how much more Fable costs, for how much more Astra costs, I do not feel like the results are there."

we are in the middle of the beginning. Its just a weird take to talk about the newest model like this while we are still in a R&D phase.

And these points don't matter if you let it search and analyse a bug, for example, or if you have good harness and a good architecture and let it do small PRs or if you do stuff no one needs to read (yes a software engineer also needs tools)

Just switch back and wait a little bit?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#12

Post by mgrosvenor »

These machines are doing some crazy things to get to the result. That said, I can't help but feel like this is the compilers argument all over again. Are the methods used to get to the result good? No. Is the code that it generates good? No. Does it achieve the goal. Yes. Is it likely to get better with time. Also yes. In my use cases, jobs that would have taken weeks to months are being done in minutes to hours. Involving complex testing and reasoning and experimentation. I'm no fanboy, but I can't argue against the speed gains. I'm sure we'll still have artisans who hand weave incredible code. But for me, I'm switching to the weaving loom for speed and efficiency.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#15

Post by idiliv »

mgrosvenor wrote: post #12

These machines are doing some crazy things to get to the result. That said, I can't help but feel like this is the compilers argument all over again. Are the methods used to get to the result good? No. Is the code that it generates good? No. Does it achieve the goal. Yes. Is it likely to get better with time. Also yes. In my use cases, jobs that would have taken weeks to months are being done in minutes to hours. Inv…

What is the "compilers argument"?

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#17

Post by cbg0 »

on_the_train wrote: post #5
lukeify wrote: post #4

Maybe it's just vibes but I've repeatedly felt like gpt-6-astra on its default setting of medium is less rigorous and thoughtful than gpt-5.6-sol on its default setting. What I am certainly not getting is any sense that we are at "AGI" yet.

Most would applaud that as Sol has quite a reputation for over engineering. Not every software needs to go to the moon.

So your experience is that Astra doesn't over engineer? For more than twice the price of Sol I think most people will take the over engineering.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#18

Post by bob1029 »

> And potentially as a byproduct of enabling all of this, you can now slop your way to a one-shot 3D game over the weekend which looks impressive.

I think we've finally reached a weird point where AI has effectively reduced the amount of competition that real game developers have to endure.

Nothing unravels faster than a game project being built with AI. You can achieve impressive results in a day, but you can't get much further than that without actual talent. LLMs will never be able to best a human environment artist at scene composition, especially if that composition needs to be directed with nuance over time.

There's a huge difference between a game that looks impressive and one that feels impressive. You can only achieve games that feel like counter strike, call of duty and overwatch with thousands of hours of human sacrifice. The AI is almost pointless once you get to play testing and balancing. Knowing how much to adjust magical integers isn't a conversation a chat bot can resolve with endless pontification tokens.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#19

Post by chambored »

Gigachad wrote: post #3

I've observed the same thing where the new models want to run obscene bash commands or python scripts which are completely unreadable and utilise every option flag that exists. It's impossible to review. These commands are less readable than regex.

I noticed that too so I appended to Claude Code’s system prompt a reminder to use the standard read/write tools, but since Claude Code switched to default auto-mode, I’ve seen it imply that the auto-mode tooling encourages the use of bash-only commands (sed, python, etc) which has a whole slew of negative side affects.

Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

#20

Post by exitb »

My own observations are that I used to target turn lengths of 10-15 minutes and these new models (since 5.6) extended that a bit to ~25 minutes, as they tend to do more tests and reviews. Targeting hours-long turns makes as much sense, as putting on cruise control and going to sleep.
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