I think the thing I'm most excited about is the increase in _user prompting_.
If I give a poorly constrained/ambiguous prompt, I don't want the model one-shotting assumptions left and right.
The demos of Fable/GPT-6 are impressive, but "real AGI" should act more like a collaborator than either a peon or overachiever.
It's a tough balance to get right, and although this has been possible to achieve with additional prompting on existing models, I find that the agents often lean too hard into the "ask questions" mode.
Hopefully this model has the right balance, or at least better?
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 spot on. A collaborator is exactly what real AGI is. It will figure out the perfect questions to ask, in the perfect order, by intelligently assessing the entire solution and problem space upfront, so when you leave it to go off on its own it isn't making stupid decisions for you.
They really need to make this work in Codex. Claude Code has had a multi-select refinement tool since forever.
Fable does a great job from my terrible prompts when coding
>>> The demos of Fable/GPT-6 are impressive, but "real AGI" should act more like a collaborator than either a peon or overachiever.
I don't really agree. The thing that makes Fable feel like an actual collaborator is its ability to sus out your real intent when you give ambiguous instructions. It's really good at it.
I watched some reviews today and came way with the impression that Astra is not better than Sol in this regard. You still have to be very specific with your instructions. For example, you can say "why is it not committed yet?" and it will give you an explanation and say it's actually ready to be committed. But it won't commit unless you explicitly say so.
That sounds like a very tedious way of working with AI agents, but I understand some people want a high level of control.