There is something odd, I've got single astra session that's now running for... 4d 13h 10m and still going.
What are you having it do?
P=np...
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
71–80 of 334 posts
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#72> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output
I don't know what to say, except that articles exactly like this one have been showing up constantly for the last three years, and literally all of them were obviously outdated and irrelevant within about a month.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#73Astra is indeed the pinnacle of "black box slop". It is overall a smarter software development agent for many things I do, but the code sometimes is indistinguishable from Brainfuck when writing things like GPU shaders. It doesn't even attempt to make it remotely formatted or readable.
Have you tried identifying exactly what is unreadable about it and telling it to make it more readable? I had GTP-5.6 write some shader code recently and it wasn't very clear to me. I spent about an hour chatting with the until I understood the concepts and was able to express them back to the AI using math formulas and variables named in a way that made sense to me. The AI then rendered the code using the formula an…
Perhaps you could have just written it yourself.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#74> the models are also just not for me as a software engineer (...) these models increasingly are for other people. For lawyers, 3D artists, mathematicians
This is a good observation, perhaps AI will not completely replace humans ins software engineering because by the time it has the capability to do so like in write a prompt and get a CRM coded for you, tokens are so expensive that you are better off spending them to substitute other disciplines (what about automating the work of the customers that would become records in that CRM?).
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#7551 comments so far, the vast majority panning Astra's coding abilities. An uninformed reader may come away with the impression that this isn't an absolutely revolutionary technology that with coding abilities many of us thought were not even going to be possible with language models as recently as a year ago.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's really good and extrapolating this rate of improvement for 6 months is rather terrifying (from a SWE perspective, at least).
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#76I 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
What’s more relevant is that apparently Astra can’t tell the difference.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#77> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming…
But doesn't this reduce the required amount of farmland?
Yes, the extra farmland gets taken by the AI companies.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#78Being good at coding is perhaps not the end goal
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#79Hey, the Python thing is interesting! I’ve noticed that Fable, too, likes to write tons of Python, even for just replacing a few lines of code. Before that used to be either some kind of internal thing or regular awk sed, now it’s full python scripts.
Re: Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
#80Most of this criticism seems to focus on the "human in the loop" and efficiency part, i.e. "it’s unreadable for a human", "the code is low quality", "it inefficiently spawns processes to run simple tasks". If the ultimate goal is to remove the human in the loop then does any of this criticism matter?