alt Hacker NewsI just tell everyone to use Fable 5.1 for everything at this point. Astra is unfortunately a dud, I'm sure they will try to fix a bunch of it with GPT-6.1 but OAI has had this issue for awhile now where every other generation has some sort of strange tic, or reward hacking issue, or something. It's almost like they are balancing the RL on the tip of a needle.
Opus 5 has issues too, comment-slop, claude-ish, etc.
5.1 on the other hand can seemingly do no wrong. Easy to work with, writes human-level code. Expensive, yes, but even at Low effort it's well worth it.
Replies
I agree with you on this. Opus feels tedious and it cannot be stopped from doing change-narration comments, but Fable feels like a real collaborator. I am usually pretty happy with the code it writes.
Interesting, in my experience Astra is a marked improvement over both Sol 5.6 and Fable 5.1. Its output feels a lot more natural, and it is just less "dumb." But individual experiences may vary.
What have you noticed about Astra? I haven't used Claude models lately so I can't compare but it seems fine compared to 5.6 Sol
My trick for using Opus is using it exclusively as a subagent managed by Fable.
"Use Opus subagents for this work where possible" is all it takes generally.
In my experience Astra/Sol are both quite good as workhorses, but not at Fable's level. I use them every day very successfully and I'm very picky.