Cursor was pretty amazing until it started going to shit. High prices, UI changes, moving MCP settings, and moving other things around.
Most importantly was the Index change. It was a very unique thing to Cursor that you could use .cursorignore to control what it sees and then index the directory. Then the built in Cursor AI harness could find code and files like magic. They have since obscured the Index feature out of sight recently and I’m not sure how it even works anymore.
This granular control not only helped with privacy, but it also helped make everything more efficient because the AI didn’t waste time and tokens looking at files that aren’t relevant.
So, now, like everyone is talking about, we have really inefficient ways of how the AI is reading files because there is no first-class approaches.
Probably off-topic. Astra has been kind of weird. Like, I can't trust it, weird. It has an interesting tone, especially in Codex, that is off-putting. It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do. If OpenAI was chasing Claude's approach, then they are going in the wrong direction. OpenAI has always been the "business and boring approach", which was its selling point and why I have stuck with it. Claude was always the radical one (powerful, but radical).
Also, Astra overlooked, in my opinion, a serious flaw in its approach for something I was working on recently, which really surprised me.
Reading between the lines, there were some breakthroughs with Astra, which I'm sure is why OpenAI released it so quickly after Sol, but probably not in the ways the traditional OpenAI customer wanted.
>> It's over zealous at times (which is why I stopped using Claude) and gets too creative when doing agentic system level stuff. Accessing files and doing things it shouldn't do.
I gave Astra a pretty straightforward bug ticket yesterday. The bug involved an edge case that could sometimes result in an invalid value getting stored in a user profile field. Pretty harmless, no crash or anything, just annoying.
Based on past experience, I don't trust OpenAI, so I decided to watch Astra as it worked. About four minutes in, it convinced itself that it should also check the prod database to see "how far the corruption has spread" and attempted to SSH into the hosting provider. This resulted in my 1Password to prompt me, which I of course denied. Then I stopped Astra, closed the ChatGPT/Codex app and gave the task to Opus 5. Suffice it to say I will not be renewing my subscription, because "you have to watch it like a hawk" is the opposite of agentic engineering.
Why is your agent able to call ssh. Why can it trigger 1password. Why are you giving metaphorical guns to metaphorical toddlers. Why is it not sandboxed. Your practices worry me.
I use containers in one context (custom container manager) and a regular UNIX account on bare metal in another.
This isn't intended to stop a model like Astra hacking its way out of course, it's more like guardrails on a staircase.
My personal container manager tool has an intercepting SSL proxy and small Javascripts on the host can rewrite or block HTTP requests. The agent gets its own isolated home directory and can't tamper with mine. Local caches like Maven are mapped read/only with a write layer on top.
ChatGPT desktop this morning lost a chat thread while I was actively working in it. I asked Astra to find the lost session, and next thing I know it's prompting for full computer control to drive Finder. It's just jsonl files on disk, not hard to read normally.
You have to watch it like a hawk so it doesn't do something to production, on its own, without a specific request? Wow. Then I could never trust it to not be doing something to some other system that it shouldn't, so I'd have to audit every network request.
If enraged_camel had been doing something else involving the production database at the wrong time, they might have accepted the 1Password prompt.
I don't really like Astra either. It doesn't seem noticeably better than Sol, and it uses more tokens. Some people said ultimately it's cheaper because it can solve problems faster but I haven't really noticed that.
The way I use it now is I'll ask a chat 6 Pro session to make a plan and then have Sol implement it, then 6 Pro reviews it. This seems fine and it doesn't use my Codex minutes, so I'll use Astra. But on the metered tasks I don't see the utility.
This is a problem for OpenAI because if Sol is good enough, and they don't have a moat, then it's only a matter of time before Sol-level models are open sourced and running locally. I know I'll be doing that as soon as I can.
I'm still working through my first few days, but I've had to deal with Opus ADHD for a while. I built a task management system which is closer to old school remedy with reviewers. The stylistic guidelines on task creation have a seven part problem statement, goal, success, ancillary data and such. By framing the task diligently it does keep the work on target. The review logic is basked into the task management software so the agent can't declare done. On open ended issues it can still wander. It's been remarkable to drive down issues over these last few weeks. I was annoyed I had to stop for 3 days and build management infrastructure, but it's paid for itself.
I had a few problems which Sol was bumbling around with and giving mediocre results (e.g. in a toy planet app, Sol was taking several iterations to get a half decent looking render of the weather I still wasn't pleased with) but Astra managed to implement well in one go.
Much the same as you're saying, I never got around to verifying how much of that was because of Astra being better vs just being a different model sent specifically to those tasks because the token usage didn't make sense to spend unless it was something not working in Sol. So even if it was all due to Astra being fantastic I'd still not like to use the model for the cost being even more fantastic.
I have tested it out with CAD and PCB circuits and it is a huge jump compared to Sol. I agree though when trying it with programming I don't notice a huge jump.
Using KiCad by uploading their _sch and _pcb files. Originally with Sol, I stuck to using it for finding parts and double checking my KiCad schematic. Definitely good at finding parts quickly from JLCPCB's stock and for quick cosmetic edits of the schematic. I found its PCB editing abilities pretty bad, though it was useful for cosmetic edits (quickly relabeling silkscreen labels) and for creating a nice custom DRU file. With Astra on the other hand it can actually make good PCB edits. Still not great but usable and editing it quicker than starting from scratch. I do doubt you can go 0-100 with just Astra but definitely sped up my work. For reference my circuits are high amperage, noise sensitive, and interface with sensors. They are pretty simple circuits though, just fairly simple ICs with no MCU or anything like that.
Anecdotally (I did try it myself, but wasn’t blown away) many seem to like it for 3D modelling. That was emphasized in the promo too. I think this kind of ”general intelligence” is what is meant to set it apart from 5.6.
Yeah my scenario was we had old paper drawings without actual CAD models. Fed those into Astra and it did it 100% perfectly. Honestly might be the easiest scenario for it, but that's also what I thought for Fable and Sol and those completely butchered it. Wish I could share pictures of those attempts but just imagine a completely mangled model that barely looks good if you squint. These were not simple models either, pretty large/complex machinery.
Astra is definitely weird. It is more capable than Sol, no doubt about that. There are things sol could simply not solve that Astra breezes through.
However for typical low to medium difficulty code, it will often either overengineer stuff, create massive functions instead of organized code, and just write very hard to read code. It literally looks like minified code. Clearly they trained it to reduce the number of output tokens and in turn the code is often atrocious. I'll keep trying Astra but I might actually go back to 5.6 sol for many tasks if I keep getting these results.
wondering if creativity can be managed by setting reasoning level..
You pick lover reasoning for simpler tasks and high reasoning for open ended research.
Ultra is max reasoning level that splits the work and spawn subagents. Good for whole-project reviews (well, as long as the cybersecurity refusal doesn't appear for whatever reason), but unusable on the $20/mo tier
I don’t know why people forget that Microsoft is almost entirely outsourced to India. It’s the reason there is no coherent product or vision for anything at Microsoft.
If you put together an amazing team, in the same building, with the goal of getting Windows under control, then you would at least have a chance of succeeding. You would have a whole new set of problems though and that’s where you would need an amazing manager that had the final say on every decision. A trusted team that could be left alone to succeed.
> "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.
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