xhigh considered harmful? uh oh.
This time around with 6.1 Sol I've been leaving that thing on max and didn't look back. (on a sub though...) Mostly cuz max seemed like it gave me less to read. I try to read as little as possible and just intuit and look at the code.
Astra writes well (which is why I often like to work with it over Claude), but it tends to produce code golf that's borderline unreadable, like completely omitting line breaks. I thought I had something funky with my config, but it seems to be a known issue.
EDIT: You can search for "tenobrus astra" on X, but link removed.
The generated code certainly does what's asked of it, but it's as sloppy as anything else I've seen. I don't think this benchmark can control for that. Maybe if it had a metric for minimum diff to satisfy the new requirement with the existing constraints on dead code etc?
I use the frontier models only in plan mode; coding is held out to cheaper models.
I run Paseo as an orchestrator with agent profiles. "Distinguished Member of Technical Staff" -> Fable, plan mode. "End-User Customer Advocate" -> Astra, plan mode. A few others. Basically, these agents (with profile prompts) can only be "consulted" for input on design elements; it's OK if they produce a bit of verbosity here. This has worked fantastically for me, really awesome to see a self-constructed team own the work end-to-end.
A "Director of Engineering" (6.1 Sol or Opus 5.5) also in plan mode organizes the team for the task and then owns coordination and instruction. You can think of this in essence like a "model router".
Coding is handled by Haiku 5.5/GPT 6 Luna/DeepSeek v4.1 Flash. One "Principal Engineer" Sonnet 5.5 or 6.1 Sol for some tasks.
I removed it, but it's frustrating when the options are someone's (reasonable) post on X, or slop-spam aggregators. I don't really want to drive visits to either, but at least the X poster can get the views.
I think it's the best possible approach. It lets you refer to content that's unfortunately stuck on the site, while still signaling clearly that it's something to avoid if possible and to apologize for if not. Omitting the link just removes information without influencing consensus on whether to use X.
edit: I wish it would let me view the darn screenshot tho :c
I've noticed the line breaks issue. It's easily fixed with a formatter like prettier and, frankly, that kind of quality-of-life thing is best handled deterministically anyway.
Doesn’t this mess up the context though? I use ruff and my agents get confused if I edit and run ruff out of band. How do people deal with that? I’m always having to remind agents to re-read files because they’ve changed
I have a simplify skill built from a rich hickey talk that basically solves the erosion and verbosity metrics SCB flagged (i.e. erosion and verbosity are way better and improve over time). However, after running the SCB benchmark I cannot find any evidence that it actually improves test pass rate trajectories. Food for thought on maintainability metrics.
Is there a reasonable way to run a representative subset myself?
Edit:
> For folks who want to try to repro these findings: I used the pinned v1.0 catalog, the stock just-solve prompt, seed 42, the any-case runner pass policy, and Docker with Python 3.12 and uv.
For most things I find medium to be the highest quality output. However if I want it to do spatial reasoning or if I want it be funny / write something (not code) of almost-passable quality, then xhigh is where it's at.
GPT 5.5 on Medium is all I use lately, I don't understand why anyone would pay drastically more for slightly more, when Opus has been good enough for a year now to do most things.
You unknowingly substituted the name of another model when you’re otherwise talking about the competitor fwiw. Some if those in the reply chain didn’t even seem to notice.
That’s a little telling of the state of ai atm though isn’t it? It’s all pretty similar. The latest Opus/GPT/Gemini/Deepseek/Kimi on medium does indeed do the job
I believe effort can mean both "solve harder problems" and "produce more stuff". I mostly don't want more stuff than I asked for, so a capable model at lower effort can indeed be the wiser choice. Faster response too.
This is interesting. Is nobody training LLMs to repeat resolving issues by patches from real projects where refactoring is required, judging the refactor similarity and not just tests passing?
Secondly, I’m mostly using Astra Ultra or Sol 6.1 when tight on quota. I pay $200/month and rarely if ever run out. Am I doing something wrong? Or perhaps I’m not that productive as you guys?
Same here. I’m feeling productive enough. If I was more “productive”, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I was producing. My attention and cognitive broadband is the bottleneck. I find it hard to believe that people are actually productive using 4 active chat windows simultaneously for 8+ hours a day.
I find QFN on xhigh usually overruns the context window for no good result. If it can do the task, it'll do it quicker on medium. If it can't do the task, xhigh won't change that.
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
EDIT: You can search for "tenobrus astra" on X, but link removed.
The generated code certainly does what's asked of it, but it's as sloppy as anything else I've seen. I don't think this benchmark can control for that. Maybe if it had a metric for minimum diff to satisfy the new requirement with the existing constraints on dead code etc?
I run Paseo as an orchestrator with agent profiles. "Distinguished Member of Technical Staff" -> Fable, plan mode. "End-User Customer Advocate" -> Astra, plan mode. A few others. Basically, these agents (with profile prompts) can only be "consulted" for input on design elements; it's OK if they produce a bit of verbosity here. This has worked fantastically for me, really awesome to see a self-constructed team own the work end-to-end.
A "Director of Engineering" (6.1 Sol or Opus 5.5) also in plan mode organizes the team for the task and then owns coordination and instruction. You can think of this in essence like a "model router".
Coding is handled by Haiku 5.5/GPT 6 Luna/DeepSeek v4.1 Flash. One "Principal Engineer" Sonnet 5.5 or 6.1 Sol for some tasks.
edit: I wish it would let me view the darn screenshot tho :c
https://xxcancel.com/tenobrus/status/2096636223414808719
Edit:
> For folks who want to try to repro these findings: I used the pinned v1.0 catalog, the stock just-solve prompt, seed 42, the any-case runner pass policy, and Docker with Python 3.12 and uv.
And https://github.com/gabeorlanski/scb-problems/
That’s a little telling of the state of ai atm though isn’t it? It’s all pretty similar. The latest Opus/GPT/Gemini/Deepseek/Kimi on medium does indeed do the job
Though, it has been a while since I've used 5.5.
But for webdev, deep research, code review, and a few other tasks I find the current 6.1 sol better.
But I use both. And I use codex more.
I believe effort can mean both "solve harder problems" and "produce more stuff". I mostly don't want more stuff than I asked for, so a capable model at lower effort can indeed be the wiser choice. Faster response too.
I am currently investigating SCB results and a larger, more representative dataset to work on would be really helpful!
Secondly, I’m mostly using Astra Ultra or Sol 6.1 when tight on quota. I pay $200/month and rarely if ever run out. Am I doing something wrong? Or perhaps I’m not that productive as you guys?
Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076391 - July 2026 (119 comments)
Recent evaluation result.
I find QFN on xhigh usually overruns the context window for no good result. If it can do the task, it'll do it quicker on medium. If it can't do the task, xhigh won't change that.
Oh, it's there at bottom under "my takeaway". But I still didn't get it initially.
Slop Code Bench? Need a Slop Writing Bench too
That is not how data physics work. It should not be how data science works.