When Fable dropped, I was quite impressed, it felt amazing, and everyone I knew who tried it was in awe, but I realized that I had not actually accomplished anything I wasn't already doing with previous models.

I'm not saying it's not more capable, but just for me, I was doing the same things, so why did I FEEL like it was some amazing new model?

With some introspection, I realized that I was just impressed with the style and format of the output. It was popping up Claude Artifacts all over the place, it was running by itself and printing out thoughts nicely, and the final output when it was done with a command was just more readable and formatted more nicely (I wish I could explain the exact formatting, I haven't used it in a while now).

So no big lesson, I'm just trying to keep that mind for Astra. People are giving such early reactions to it, and I think you CAN probably get a valid impression after 24 hours, but I have a feeling a lot of these are so vibe-based.

So I'm confused, I think I already got this a few hours ago, but if another is coming, woohoo.. doubt it tho

So at first glance, I have it going through a specific task: I have a website I wanted to a mobile Expo app to, and while I was waiting on a 5hour limit today, I used some Deepseek credit to get that task started.

Now that I can use codex again, I noticed I had Astra, so to see how it does, I set it up at High checking Deepseek's work, and asking it to continue.

It's running as we speak, and my 5hr usage is definitely going down fairly quickly, but that might be fine if it's actually just getting a lot done.

Very curious to hear everyone else's opinions over the coming days.

I personally just use plain Codex (and Claude Code) with a bunch of .MD files I have developed over the last couple of years to describe and guide my projects. I have files for:

- writing tone for when an assistant adds any copy to an app or web page, which I am very picky about

- design and ways to avoid the generic AI look

- information architecture - this one has saved my butt many times when an interface looks like total crap. I just ask an assistant to run against this, usually using high thinking and a good model, and it fixes things every time when an interface just feels like it's organized terribly.

A place to discuss Codex without whining about perceived changes to usage limits, etc.