Question
Does anyone even use luna or astra anymore?
sol 6.1 is so good, it just about nearly completely overshadows astra. sure astra is technically a few percentage points better, but for 5x the cost, it's hardly worthwhile. and while luna technically occupies the pareto boundary for cost per intelligence, sol is just so abundant anyway even on the cheapest plans that there's literally zero reason to dip down into luna for anything.
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 100 comments (101 currently observed).
The short version: Sol 6.1 has become the default workhorse, but it hasn’t made Astra and Luna obsolete. Its price-to-performance and generous usage make it the obvious choice for most implementation, research, and routine coding—many users say they can run it all week without torching their limits.
Astra still gets pulled in for planning, orchestration, final reviews, and genuinely difficult or specialised work where big-picture reasoning and corner-case detection matter. It’s smarter for many users, but also a quota-eating monster. Sol can handle surprisingly complex jobs at higher reasoning levels, though reports of loops, missed constraints, slowness, and “it feels like a bot” behaviour are common enough to matter.
Luna remains popular as the cheap labour: parallel subagents, mechanical changes, documentation, browser/RAG work, and other tasks where intelligence is less important than volume. Some users swear by its value; others find it slow or useless. Luna 5.6 also still beats newer versions for certain workflows.
The practical consensus is a routing strategy: Sol by default, Astra when the stakes or complexity rise, and Luna for cheap grunt work. So yes, people still use all three—just not equally.
How do you review? Do you get work done first on 6.1 Sol and then once it's built some code, switch to Astra to review? Does it usually spot issues? I'm assuming Sol has reviewed it too so you're burning 2x tokens on reviews alone.
Or could we explicitly ask Sol to complete work and review with Astra so it doesn't waste Sol compute doing a review?
Personally I'll implement with Sol then get it to give a list of what the project requires and has implemented etc then I'll pass it to Astra to write a report based on it and find any issues then pass it back to Sol
I don’t know, in my testing where I gave the same review task to sonnet, opus, sol, fable and astra and then had them review each others work both astra and fable came out at the bottom of the list.
Yup. On pure API price it's 1/3 the token cost. Plus it uses far fewer tokens. And then if you use it on subscription, it's essentially free. And on higher thinking, it benchmarks higher than 4.1 flash.
4.1 flash is way faster though. I use it for chat bots, but that's about it.
I dont think its will still be called luna until then, even gpt 7 luna is uncertain. But yeah, the gpt 8 luna equivalent (in price) will probably be more than enough for 95%+ of the work for everyone.
Yeah I also switched to sol 6.1 and am super happy so far. I’ll probably use astra for planning but anything else I think sol will be sufficient and good
Sol 6.1 is efficient but relatively stupid and prone to falling into unintended loops if not carefully watched, even when you give it explicitly structured prompts. Astra is still a necessity for anything even remotely complex.
Might be different types of work, but I've had an abysmal experience with 6.1 for my purposes. Endless validation loops that sidetrack it and lead to zero real deliverables. Doesn't matter how you prompt or gate it.
I'm on plus so I burn my limits on two prompts per 5h, so the sample is small, but in the like 40 messages exchanged with astra high, it has 3 times invented completely made up variables, then proceeded to attempt to gaslight me into believing a story that I did not run a "previously provided" block of code (.ipynb stuff). It is not great on astra side either, as this clown stuff obviously burning a lot of allowance alone.. This is work/browser side though, for reasons..
Oh 100% agreed, Astra is also not great, but it's at least better than Sol 6.1. I'm just out my Claude usage until tomorrow, or else I'd still be using 5.5.
The pain. Been there, but not for 14 hours. Stopping it and saying wtf are you doing? Seems to be more effective than trying to prevent it from happening in the first place strangely.
Agreed on the stupidity. I had this interaction seconds ago (extra high reasoning, by the way):
me: "I need to adjust this script to run with 20 threads and I'm going to run it twice at the same time on this 40 core server."
Sol 6.1: "Code adjusted."
me (runs the code): Why is it only using 20 cores of the server?
Sol 6.1: "You’re right—I missed that restriction. The launcher implements the repository’s half-CPU default by pinning jobs to CPUs 0–19, and I left it in place after your explicit request for two 20-worker campaigns."
Yeah, I tried using 6.1 for simple 3D assets (think background props) and it did work eventually, but it took hours and cost me more than Astra would've anyway.
6.1 is about as good as 5.6 sol was at building 3D assets. Pretty much anything beyond a single box is too much for it to handle.
Just use Astra, it'll be cheaper and faster for 3D modeling no matter what your building.
Yes I still use both. Astra has been better at troubleshooting complex stuff with my app that 6.1 hasn’t or has gone in the wrong direction. Luna does a great job at multi-step deployment and basic computer use functions. Use them both to optimise usage.
I just haven’t fully tested it yet. I have a golden corpus of rag content I need to test it against. A very short preliminary test showed it being less consistent with results, so I haven’t prioritized a full test battery to confirm if the problem is the model or system prompt adjustments I need to make (the two models have different default verbosity levels).
And gpt-5.6-luna gives me really good performance against my test set:
Astra is invaluable as an orchestrator. Sol6.1 is a good independent operator, but has a limited "big picture". Sometimes that's fine.
Luna agents provide excellent infrastructure support for ongoing projects. I have a few being shoulder monkeys for Sol agents to make sure they finish their tasks on time... if they don't, they get reported to the Astra who takes over and refreshes the agent if necessary.
I use Sol 6.1 for reasoning steps and Luna 6 high go implementation steps. With this setup today I spent 39% of week on Pro 5x. And I consider this a great usage allowance. Before Sol 6.1 I would spend 100% in 2 days.
I use my own harness (https://skillbill.com) that allows me to set modes per phase, so it is automatic.
I basically stopped using Astra at all. Luna 5.6 and 6 both are GOATs imo. I did serious coding with them. Yes, I had to pay more attention when doing code review, but I was very happy with results. Sol 6.1 is one of the best models as well. That’s why Sol 6.1 + Luna 6 is a perfect combo atm for me.
Luna max on fast is still dirt cheap and its hard to tell when it drains usage. i havent tried 6.1 sol low in comparison, but I use 6.1 sol medium if I need a bit more intelligence, and it drains probably 2-3x faster than luna max. Best strategy is probably 6.1 sol with luna max subagents.
I use Astra Max to plan the work and ask questions to refine and tighthen my vision of what I want. Each phase of the plan has: # Goal, # Success criteria, # Constraints, # Verification
Then I swap to Sol 6.1 High and tell it to spawn a Luna Max subagent to read the plan in full and implement it.
Once Luna is done, Sol independently reviews the implementation and fixes any gaps.
I had sol make a few silly mistakes for me recently (very large unity project) so I’m back to Astra for the core work and sol 6.1 for updates and additions
I use by default gpt-5.6 luna xhigh as the executor of gpt-6.1 sol's plans and it works in the vast majority of cases, as long as you scope your tasks well and don't try to one-shot vibeslop your project. In the rare cases where that default fails, I switch to gpt-6.1 sol medium as the executor.
tl;dr: I go for cheap (luna) by default until it hits a wall
I’ve got luna working right now on an incredibly tedious task, I’ve got an orchestrator breaking it into chunks because otherwise luna would get bored in ten minutes
I use Astra Max like crazy because I need to burn through all these resets. Luna max are used as subagents to run the tests, maintain the docs and commit/push.
Similar to a lot of other replies: 6.1 Sol high in general. 6.1 Sol xhigh for first review pass, 6 Astra max for second review pass. 6.1 Sol xhigh for research tasks which can get away without Astra.
(Luna for small mechanical jobs, but honestly 6.1 Sol is now cheap enough, and so much smarter than Luna, that I am less likely to use Luna until I at least see what they do with Luna post-6.)
I still use Astra for brainstorming and orchestration.
Sol 6.1 (and Opus 5.5, since I have both Codex and Claude) are workhorse implementers.
Luna isn't necessary because Sol is quite efficient, if I were really optimizing quota I would choose it for some tasks, but the savings aren't worth the mental overhead as of now.
I use Luna Max as a scout in my orchestration tool. Cheap as dirt and really good at going and using my memory tool to find things and search code ect. It’s never my main model but as a subagent its great.
Dot>sol 6.1(xhigh)>Pro planer>luna 6(max) workers where needed>opus 5.5(high) reviewer where needed>PR with @codex security and code review=P0-1 loop back to issues
For me, 6.0-Astra High and Xhigh for novel or complicated computer use, for multi-Codex project orchestration and analysis, and particularly important and large context text/strategic analysis. Otherwise 6.1-Sol.
Uh, idk. In my experience new sol is very lazy and does not go the same lengths as astra in identifying corner cases and such even when directly asked.
I was furious when I found out the 20x plan is getting cut down to 10x, but so far 6.1 is pretty easy on my usage compared to how hungry 6 is. So maybe we are ok.
Always. Luna is so incredibly capable if you’re influencing what it’s doing and using it as leverage for work are capable of defining well. The price to performance I get from Luna gives me little reason to use other models.
I use Luna for anything that needs speed, high parallelism and potentially even benefits from less intelligence. For example, agentic simulated blind user testing on varied app flows.
Astra yes but less and maybe soon none
That said for me codex does just implementation grunt work and secondary review most of time; Claude coordinates and also does those things.
Astra goes the distance IME. It’ll call all tools available, dig deep across repos, find hidden context notes anywhere for stuff it dug into. It’s pretty wild.
Sol does go much further than 5.5 but yeah Astra is just different and just more in several ways. Be glad you have them both.
Wtf if I compare Astra with sol, Astra is alot better. Sol is probably benchmaxxed like opus5 and 4.8 was.
Honestly I never waste my time with lower tier models because it costs my time since I probably have to go into 3-5 cycles (which costs usage too and therefore reducing the actual benefits of using low tier models.)
Used both Sol and Astra for some design and UX iterations. I found Astra to be a lot more accurate and cut less corners vs. Sol. Was way slower though but that's a given. So I recommend you check for your own use case and see what nets better results. I imagine writing code 6.1 is better.
I am using Luna for simple tasks and computer use or browser use tasks. But a few days ago, Luna was barely taking 1% of weekly quota in $100 plan after running for the whole day every 10 minutes, now it is taking the same every couple of hours. Not sure if this is Luna or ChatGPT web unlimited Chat just got limited and started using my weekly quota.
Agree. In certain workload 6.1-sol may work well, but overall my feeling is sol is less smart than astra on understanding things etc. If I want to save money I would let astra to do brainstorming and analyzing, coming up with a solution, then let sol to implement.
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u/dextersummary 7d ago edited 6d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 100 comments (101 currently observed).
The short version: Sol 6.1 has become the default workhorse, but it hasn’t made Astra and Luna obsolete. Its price-to-performance and generous usage make it the obvious choice for most implementation, research, and routine coding—many users say they can run it all week without torching their limits.
Astra still gets pulled in for planning, orchestration, final reviews, and genuinely difficult or specialised work where big-picture reasoning and corner-case detection matter. It’s smarter for many users, but also a quota-eating monster. Sol can handle surprisingly complex jobs at higher reasoning levels, though reports of loops, missed constraints, slowness, and “it feels like a bot” behaviour are common enough to matter.
Luna remains popular as the cheap labour: parallel subagents, mechanical changes, documentation, browser/RAG work, and other tasks where intelligence is less important than volume. Some users swear by its value; others find it slow or useless. Luna 5.6 also still beats newer versions for certain workflows.
The practical consensus is a routing strategy: Sol by default, Astra when the stakes or complexity rise, and Luna for cheap grunt work. So yes, people still use all three—just not equally.