Astra
OpenAI's frontier code model currently in use by engineering teams. Every AI Coding Weekly story on Astra, newest first. 8 stories since September 2026.
- ThePrimeagen burns 56% of a $500 plan in an hour
One hour of prompting, more than half a week of allowance gone, and a follow-up pointing at Astra.
- Zechner flips to Sol the same day Theo says it ran in circles
Two engineers who actually ran the models landed on opposite verdicts in the same week.
- Theo says Opus 5.5 threw out Astra's Rust port, not fixed it
The 10 hour result stands, but the mechanism behind it was a from-scratch rewrite in a new crate.
- One agent goal has landed 575 PRs moving OpenClaw to async
Steinberger calls sync database access his biggest design mistake after the move to SQLite, and says the fix is shipping as it goes.
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- Theo's Jev router benchmark shows no win on cost or speed
A $1,000 overnight run on DeepSWE put OpenRouter's new router level with GPT-6 Astra on low, slightly pricier and almost 5x slower.
- Theo's judge panel ranks Astra first, Grok 4.7 far back
Then he ran the same ranking with Astra as judge, and Fable finished last.
- roon says Astra's code makes corrigibility a matter of faith
Theo quote-posted it as OpenAI employees inventing words for unreadable code, then agreed the fix belongs in the model.
- dax moves part of his team off Astra after spend doubles
One team's cost numbers, a few bad impressions and a paused top tier all landed in the same week.
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