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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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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.

Quite good as work horses? To me Luna is the work horse and Sol and Astra are prancing thoroughbreds. If I use Sol or Astra for anything other than curated reasoning and planning I will burn through my usage limits in an hour.

Same. I use Luna for research/scout/test subagents, Sol for coordinator, Terra for delegate, and Astra high for review and simplify. Even with Astra in there, it’s fresh context, and I’m consistently amazed by how far I can stretch my $20 subscription with really good results.

what harness?

Why do you use Sol for the coordinator? Does it also do planning and design? Because otherwise you are cranking Sol turns on very mundane orchestration jobs.

I used to do this but recently I switched to having Fable 5.1 spawn forks of itself rather than Opus subagents. Yes it's more expensive but you don't pay for reads that already happened pre-fork, and you end up doing less rework since Fable agents are just much smarter.

That makes sense. I'm also using $200/mo Claude subscriptions, so I want to take advantage of the other 50% by using Opus.

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.

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

- It doesn't write great code.

- Occasionally has strange tics around asking for permission for obvious next-steps, implied actions, etc.

- It's very expensive, both in terms of tokens and % usage on subscription plans.

- Relatedly, effort level is unintuitive. Sometimes it seems like higher effort levels are actually cheaper due to not under-thinking and needing to correct work. But other times they are overkill and send the model into rabbitholes.

That said, it's fantastic as a code-reviewer or "hunter seeker". It's better at finding bugs than Fable and "Get this well articulated task done single-mindedly" is an Astra-shaped task.

I gave up on fable 5 after I asked it to critique my PR and it spit out a page of complete nonsense technical jargon. Like, to the point that I had to review the feedback with other models and try to parse what it was saying and ultimately it wasn't even right. Compare to Astra and Sol where I can almost forget there's a model and just speak/read naturally.

I think I should give 5.1 another chance but I am just so triggered by the way it talks after spending so long battling fable 5.

Also I'm starting to wonder if the latest round of models have finally saturated for my personal coding needs. I mean obviously not for taste and judgement, but those barely seem to improve with model generations. For just spitting out a 1000-line feature I've vaguely scoped out, Astra feels basically as good as I need.

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.

It's a great model and you're right it does feel quite natural at times while Fable 5.1 still has a claude-ish shape to it. Unfortunately I just find that it's not reliable enough as a daily driver and ends up performing specialist tasks rather than being the primary pane of glass.

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