OpenAI's Astra Struggles With Long-Term Architecture: Duplication, Overengineering, Bad Assumptions Linger
Substantial_Swan_144 · reddit · 2026-09-18
A Reddit developer shares a frustrating experience using OpenAI's Astra on a real project. Asked to output a project tree, the codebase revealed thoughtless feature design, pervasive overengineering, and heavy code duplication, with many tiny functions promoted to full modules. While Astra can backtrack and even undo wrong assumptions, it resists doing so, keeping bad code "for compatibility." The author argues that models truly built for vibe coding must commit to long-term architectural choices, and that getting them to respect such decisions remains an uphill battle—though newer models are gradually improving.
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