Ask HN: Is GPT-6 Astra worth the 2.5x cost increase over GPT-5.6 Sol?

Posted by minimaxir 1 day ago

Comments on social media (when discounting the ironic posts) are mixed whether Astra is worth the cost increase, similar to the Fable-Opus transition.

For the novel projects I'm working on, Astra did unblock me where I was stuck with GPT 5.6 Sol, which in itself gives it value for myself, but outside of that it's not a significant improvement if at all. I have noticed Astra is more efficient so for my use case it may not be 2.5x cost.

Comments

Comment by PaulShin 2 hours ago

Charge up and use a deep prompt, just like when using an ultimate ability in a game.

Comment by ipaddr 15 hours ago

For the average person on here no. In fact 5.6 is probably unneeded. What DeepSeek 731 flash offers most wouldn't need anything else.

I use to want to use the best model because I wanted the highest quality output but they all produce that now. If you are trying to understand an ancient language humans don't or solve a math mystery or fixing old undocumented firmware maybe. If you are trying to create a react app or backend I wouldn't bother.

The rule of thumb is if Stack overflow could answer your question don't bother with Astra or Sol.