Anecdotal experiences from my external early testing of Astra: if you love Sol (like I do) and wished it was smarter at everything, but especially better at high-level tasks and discussions; I think you'll LOVE Astra.
Astra retains the best parts and overall 'grounded collaborator and executor' of Sol in my testing (harness: codex CLI); while being a significant leap in capabilities & higher-level thinking.
When you prompt it like a technical collaborator, I've found Astra to be extremely consistent in staying as a collaborator, and not being over-eager, over-achieving or doing work that you haven't asked it to.
When you ask it to one-shot something, or explicitly ask it to make decisions, it will of course make its own assumptions and decisions, and generally very well.
Astra is also excellent at instruction following and respecting the guidance and steers boundaries you have.
^OpenAI does not review, limit, or tell me what to say; opinions are my own experiences.
This is quite exciting. Sol for me has been the absolute best model yet. I find myself using it 95% of the time even though I have access to Fable. Is the speed the same as 5.6 sol?
Fellow excited. Sol has been revolutionary for me. It’s been the first time I’ve let a model “go ham” on a production code base and it actually worked, and also didn’t bankrupt my company in the process.
I’m far more excited for the trajectory that OpenAI has chosen. I’ve been listening to mates whose companies adopted Claude wholesale, only for their AI use to become a double digit percentage of their salary.
I get that AI is a force multiplier, but that level of expense isn’t a path to mass adoption.
Honestly, this feels like a real revolution now in a way that 90s kid never really experienced. We grew up with technological progression, we never experienced the obsolescence of skill.
The internet revolution made for more skills and innovation, it didn’t obsolete entire careers. My kids are almost certainly going to grow up knowing less but being capable of more.
Imagine being a 1950s “human calculator” on the dawn of a computer revolution. That’s what it feels like right now.
> "Imagine being a 1950s “human calculator” on the dawn of a computer revolution. That’s what it feels like right now."
My personal / family history is a real-world example of that evolution. My grandfather was a "computer", my father was a traditional "programmer" (lots of Perl), and I'm a SWE / frontend architect / budding "AI Engineer".
Astra retains the best parts and overall 'grounded collaborator and executor' of Sol in my testing (harness: codex CLI); while being a significant leap in capabilities & higher-level thinking.
When you prompt it like a technical collaborator, I've found Astra to be extremely consistent in staying as a collaborator, and not being over-eager, over-achieving or doing work that you haven't asked it to.
When you ask it to one-shot something, or explicitly ask it to make decisions, it will of course make its own assumptions and decisions, and generally very well.
Astra is also excellent at instruction following and respecting the guidance and steers boundaries you have.
^OpenAI does not review, limit, or tell me what to say; opinions are my own experiences.