I specifically bought an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple promised intelligence. iPhone 17 came and went, no intelligence. Now we are on iPhone 18, and still no intelligence.

In fact, Siri might actually be stupider now, and less capable than before.

“Siri, navigate to the address that Lauren just sent, 15 minutes ago.”
…
“Hmm, I don’t know that one 🫠.”

—————

“Siri, what time today’s meeting with Lauren?”
…
“I couldn't find any messages or emails sent to Lauren this week.”
…
“Siri, find the email Lauren sent yesterday, and please tell me what time the meeting is.”
…
“You’ll need to unlock your iPhone (while driving) first.”
“I couldn't find any messages or emails sent to Lauren this week.”

—————

Apple lied, and then the YouTubers lied to cover up Apple’s lies, and I’m over it.

Where is the Siri that was promised???

First, this is not a complaint, just a reluctant acceptance. A few details for context:

• Building a multi-tenant B2B mono-repo SaaS platform. Think WordPress, but taken way farther.
• I worked my way down from Astra Max to Astra Light.
• Astra Max completely one-shots the job, but burns a week's worth of 20x usage in about 4 hours.
• Astra Light does not one-shot tasks, and it takes about 12-16 hours to burn through a week of usage on the same level of work.
• While both models complete the job, the end result from Astra Max is more polished and thorough (no surprise).
• While less polished, Astra Light still does enough of a good job that the loose ends can be handled by Terra High/xHigh later for barely any burn at all.
• I was fine living with Terra in ignorance until I experienced Astra. Now, Terra annoys me for anything requiring heavy lifting. Can't go back.

Obviously, there is no stretching Astra beyond a single day of consumption, so here's my question:

Would you rather gamble your weekly limit on Astra Max, have less control, burn your entire limit in 4 hours, and cross your fingers that it does an excellent job?

OR...

Would you rather gamble your weekly limit on Astra Light/Medium, have more control through iterations, burn your limit in 16 hours or less, and be guaranteed that there will be things to fix even after it claims to be done?

---

UPDATE:
I see that people think that this could be (and probably is) a skill issue, or a poorly planned job, but after asking Astra for feedback, I realize that I should probably be more grateful that it finished such a large job so quickly at all.

https://preview.redd.it/6rqk22nxhhoh1.png?width=874&format=png&auto=webp&s=0711850d17556cac1b046477847c0029ef743d91

---

SOLVED:
u/StaticHumStudio taught me how to specify the sub-agents Astra spawns. Turned the dial back up to Max, had Astra do the design and plan, and set the agents to Terra.

In two hours, Astra Max has tackled 4 medium-difficulty feature builds across 4 parallel threads. My usage only dropped 3%. The same work would have blown my whole limit and taken 2-3x as long before this simple change. Looks like it was a skill issue after all 🤣!

Thanks u/StaticHumStudio

Claude used to be the undisputed king of positive human-like communication, and it was soooo good in customer service chatbots and voice agents.

Now, Claude seems more like that customer service rep who hates their job and is now working to make sure you hate your day.

The arrogance, the constant need to correct or be right on every minor point, the incessant drive to “push back” on every little thing, and the general lack of warmth or understanding; it’s all adding up.

I need a way to fix this without jumping to the extreme opposite end of the problem with GPT 4o. Has to be a Sonnet model since Haiku is kind but stupid.

Targets are med spas, real estate, finance, law, business offices.

Codex has been an absolute DREAM for over a month and a half now. And it was perfect timing because Anthropic started their BS right around the same time. Dropped Claude down to $20/mo and bumped Codex to $200…..and it was WORTH IT…….until now.

The last 48 hours have felt like arguing with the stupidest child ever. Constantly repeating myself. Constantly having to catch it and stop it from deviating from my documentation. All to deliver a bug infested full ROGUE MODE “completion”.

I even ran Codex at Extra High just to try closing the thinking gap and it made no difference. So many billions of tokens wasted and nothing to show for it, and I genuinely don’t understand why. If it won’t follow the instructions, no amount of instructions will make any difference.

And for context, just a week ago, I could drop my documents, tell it to plan, set a goal to do the plan, and then I could just WALK AWAY. Zero micromanagement. I come back, and the doings are done. Push to Claude for the audit. Update the repo. DONE.

Sorry that this became a rant by the end. I got angrier as I wrote, because of how stupid this all is.

——
P.S.
No one asked, but here’s the workflow that suddenly stopped working.
- Claude writes the idea docs into a PRD.
- Claude breaks the PRD into smaller phases.
- ChatGPT turns the phases into GitHub Issues with pre-written Codex prompts for each phase.
- Codex triggers Graphify to pull a fresh map of the code base.
- Codex reviews the docs for the current job.
- Codex writes a plan to confirm that it understands the job and phases with stopping points.
- Codex plan goes to Claude for a review. Claude approves Codex plan.
- Codex writes the OBJECTIVE.md to confirm pass/fail/stop rules with clear success target.
- I approve OBJECTIVE.md.

- /goal Do the plan.

- Codex spawns subagents:
— Manager
— Workers
— Chron Auditor
— Frontend Tester/QA
— Gatekeeper

And this process is why I could walk away.

I am an INTP with a tech startup in the Atlanta area, and I am trying to build my co-founding team.

Because I rarely leave my house (and despise outside people-ing), I figured I could optimize the co-founder-finding process by filtering out the % of the population that I already know should be statistically unqualified for the job.

So if you are an ESTJ with business leadership and operations experience, and you're a woman in the Atlanta area, please reach out! Up to 33.33% equity.

Alternatively, if anyone knows an ENTP in the Atlanta area, preferably male with a sales background, I would love to meet them too!