It's said Astra is based on a newly pretrained model. Personally I hope it solves the problem that GPT speaks weirdly (which can also be spotted on Claude models after Opus 4.8 but GPT's is more severe) because IMO the way GPT couldn't get how to write
good code (obviously it's trined to write code which pass benchmarks, but never code which sound
good, with pursuit towards simplification and code aesthetic in mind) is extremely similar with how it couldn't get how to speak like a human.
However, it seems like OpenAI didn't pay much attention on these perspectives and I didn't find if Astra could write a more elegant code, or communicate more naturally, etc., which made me somehow a little disappointed.
They indeed mentioned the code Astra delivered is closer to production grade but production-grade code is different from what I want since there can be a kind of messy code blowing up your whole architecture design with control flows nobody truly understands but just passes all tests perfectly. There is no difficulty in maintaining this kind of code because you only need to paste the problems into Codex. And we all know this sounds incorrect. I don't know if my appetite towards a good code (no matter how) is sound but I just imagined frontier labs to give more attention on this.
Note: fwiw Fable 5.1's release page says it's better at these perspectives of coding and per my experience, yes it is.