I asked Astra for fully working code, and it gave me bad code.
But when I broke it down into function units, some parts were bad and some parts were good.
So I can't tell the difference
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
51–60 of 334 posts
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#52gpt-6-astra is a bitch, it constantly scope creeps itself with "yet another thing" to give it that darn polished lick. the results are eventually a little bit better but at what cost? let's do the math. gpt-5.6-sol: 1x base gpt-6-astra 2.5x base in subscription then gpt-6-astra tends to spawn subagents a lot, often with all kinds of models such as gpt-5.6, 5.3-codex etc., which is neat. it's a good coordinator but ev…
> each costs like 15 minutes
I've got a custom agent loop that will reuse unit testing results if no apply patch operations occurred since the last invoke.
Wall clock time isn't something I would put on the AI provider. That's entirely a consequence of the system that you've brought to the party.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#53> 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…
Discoverability has been the main challenge for smaller game dev companies for a while now and a flood of slop will only make it worse
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#54> 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…
> LLMs will never be able
That is a very bold claim, unless you meant "current LLMs".
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#55Early lesson I learned from AI engineering was - there is no substitute to giving a groomed epic to an agent. Instead of simply saying 'implement themes in my product' you need to be specific, in fact more specific than usual. You need to say exactly what is in scope and what's not, even down to a buttons, events and layouts.
You can groom the epic with the help of AI, but final review must be done by someone who can take ownership of the specs and hence is responsible if something has fallen through the cracks. AI's response will be limited by the output tokens of that specific agent, and there will no repercussions for AI even if it accepts its mistakes.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#56These 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"?
Lots of really silly people love to compare LLMs to compilers. "You don't look at the compiled code either" and "Back in the day, people also had negative reactions to compilers and wanted to keep writing assembly by hand" and other such nonsense.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the "compilers argument"?
Back in the day, the argument was that compilers produce unreadable assembly, so people used to writing assembly were arguing against the use of compilers. Compilers also had bugs, so we still had to debug the assembly to understand how to fix the problem. Nowadays, almost nobody has to resort to those steps, except of course compiler developers. But that is just a testament to the quality of compilers. Comparing LLM…
What you say is true, the comparison indeed doesn't hold.
But is it relevant? does it matter from a product perspective if LLMs are non-deterministic. You don't need to one shot the correct result, english is ambiguous and LLMs non-deterministic, but you can iterate.
If it's possible to iterate fast and cheap enough, even ambiguous language can produce the results you want, given enough iterations.
There are a lot of ifs and buts here, just a thought on the compiler argument.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#58> 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…
>> 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.
Do these games really look impressive? Everything I've seen has looked like someone completely new to Unity/Unreal has slapped together a bunch of premade scripts and very poor 3d assets.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#59In SWE I've found gpt-6-astra (high) inconsistent and oddly focused on overtly taking responsibility for mistakes it made rather than prioritizing concrete steps to rectify problems. Such steps once elicited are often either incomplete or beyond the scope.
Opus also does this and then writes comments in code or PR descriptions describing how it went wrong earlier in the session.
Just imagine how confused a human would have to be to do that. And we want to trust these clankers to build software.
The biggest issue with LLMs is that they still suck at general contextual awareness and ability to judge what is appropriate.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#60I'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.
If these tools are as clever as they seem then why not just tell them to rewrite the code in a more review friendly style?
I only dabble in the use of LLMs to generate code for hobby programming (I'm retired from software development) so I don't use any specialised tools.
I almost always have to tell ChatGPT (via Duck AI usually) to rewrite several times even when it has produced a workable script just because it has often used some unnecessarily roundabout way of achieving something. Usually with extra prompting I can get something that is both more efficient and more readable.