I've stopped using Astra entirely and remain on Sol orchestrating Luna Xhigh, but it's still not nearly a week's usage for a week's allotment.
And even then, whenever a new model is about to come out, it feels like the model I'm using is being dumbed down substantially.
I have no evidence for this and can have no evidence for this, but I can vote with my wallet regardless.
According to API usage, they cut you off at around the equivalent of 900$ of API usage, whatever that means. It's very difficult to track all this, and very subjective. What validates me is that of all my friends I am not the only one.
I can only imagine the 100$ users must be feeling the rug being pulled even harder.
Anyway, this has led me to get a Spark, and a second is on the way.
Agreed on the “being dumbed down” observation. It appears they’re most powerful at release time and then are gradually “optimized” so every new model feels more powerful. But there’s no evidence on routing to a deployment with other weights. It would be plausible to do so though at least at peak times.
I wonder what dangoodmanUT is using! This is the time to compare!
It's also the case that working on massive codebases is just a different beast. If they've been slopmining a monorepo for months with 200x, then their codebase is probably Lovecraftian at that point and requiring extensive effort to iterate on.
I am so used to doing planning with the best models and switching to Luna, Deepseek 4.1 Flash (really, the cheapest model, and often much better results for lots of things) really people are limiting themselves when they only use one company's models. You really gain a TON by treating each one more like different people with diverse range of personalities, passions, skills, and knowledge.
Today, ChatGPT desktop app was tasked with making 7 variations of new versions of some existing websites of mine - and they all kinda looked the same. I did get lazy with it though.... I can solve that probably, with skills/changing the default frontend skills but also just sending the same task to Reasonix Code w/ deepseek, and some other models, gets some good wide range of outputs.
Even when I try to stick with Sol X/High, my limits are at best half of what they were before Astra launched, and the intelligence has declined markedly.
I cancelled my $100 plan. This is absolutely absurd and frankly unusable now.
When I’m doing work on a repo where I’m implementing a standard and the agents have to read the standard to keep from hallucinating my usage skyrockets.
Hell this changes depending on which language I’m working with.