Astra vs Fable 5.1 - Day 1

Yesterday after a rant about getting downgraded from Fable 5.1 to Opus, for issues that had literally nothing to do with, well, anything, I decided to give Astra a try. Subscribed to the 20x plan and spun everything up.

I am a huge fan of Claude, in general. I like the workflow. I used Claude Code and Designer, a lot. And I for sure don't have faith in Astra at this point. Meaning I'm not going to just let it start making too many changes to my codebase. So right now, it's baby steps to see the differences, advantages, and disadvantages.

One thing I notice right away: I can understand it. I'm not asking it to please explain its idioms. Pants and suspenders, full stop, milk and cookies, or whatever shorthand Claude uses.

90% of my work was done with Opus 5. And as good as it was, I spent a fairly large amount of time simply asking it to explain itself. And yes, I had tried the "concise" mode as well as every other mode it had in that regard.

Two things I also notice: not every message is getting a "two things I also noticed." I can appreciate when Claude finds something wrong. But it often invents problems that simply don't exist in my codebase. And I've started to just ignore those "two things." Skimming through several pages of output for fairly straightforward prompts can get tiring.

Token usage: it burns tokens, for sure. So far, though, it seems like I can predict where it's going. This is early on so I'm not 100% on that yet. But with Fable 5.1 it really feels like I'm at a slot machine, and with one pull, God only knows what's going to happen. Here it seems a bit more regulated, and I can watch the usage and more accurately predict where it's going.

Again, early on, so I may be eating my words on this one.

Now the real question: do I like it more? For sure I cannot judge that at all. This is a new shiny toy, and often the grass is greener. I need at least a few weeks of daily usage to really know.