alt Hacker News- 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.