--- title: “I don’t use Astra every day”: OpenAI developer lead... description: OpenAI's EMEA developer experience lead Vaibhav Srivastav explains why he uses GPT-6.1 Sol daily instead of the pricier GPT-6 Astra. Sol gets up to 95% of... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/i-don-t-use-astra-every-day-openai-developer-lead-tells-tns-why-uej4aa1nt twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: “I don’t use Astra every day”: OpenAI developer lead tells TNS why | daily.dev og:description: OpenAI's EMEA developer experience lead Vaibhav Srivastav explains why he uses GPT-6.1 Sol daily instead of the pricier GPT-6 Astra. Sol gets up to 95% of... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-don-t-use-astra-every-day-openai-developer-lead-tells-tns-why-uej4aa1nt og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/UEj4AA1nt.png og:image:alt: “I don’t use Astra every day”: OpenAI developer lead tells TNS why og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # “I don’t use Astra every day”: OpenAI developer lead tells TNS why **[The New Stack](https://daily.dev/sources/newstack)** · [@jkriggins](https://daily.dev/jkriggins) · 12 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary OpenAI's EMEA developer experience lead Vaibhav Srivastav explains why he uses GPT-6.1 Sol daily instead of the pricier GPT-6 Astra. Sol gets up to 95% of Astra's performance at one-fifth the cost, and benchmarks such as Terminal-Bench 4.0 and SWE-bench show the two very close, alongside internal dogfooding. He reserves Astra for fresh-context adversarial code review and new, unfamiliar problems. Ultrafast mode now supports both models, running over 300 tokens per second, with Sol on Ultrafast costing 1.2 times standard Astra. He also covers Auto-review, made free for Codex and ChatGPT subscribers, where over 5 million weekly active users can benefit, the Decisions API at $0.10 per million uncached input tokens, and OpenAI dots, persistent background agents that in his own setup connect to Slack, GitHub, Gmail and calendar. OpenAI gives three months' API deprecation notice per model. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What's the performance and cost difference between GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra? GPT-6.1 Sol reaches up to 95% of GPT-6 Astra's performance on benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 4.0 and SWE-bench, at one-fifth the standard input and output token cost. OpenAI's own developer experience lead uses Sol as his daily driver and reserves Astra for fresh-context adversarial code review or unfamiliar new problems where he wants a second, unbiased opinion. _Comparing model cost versus capability trade-offs like this is easier when daily.dev surfaces real usage reports, not just spec sheets._ ### How fast is OpenAI's Ultrafast mode and what does it cost? Ultrafast mode delivers over 300 tokens per second for both GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, intended for real-time use cases like fraud detection, financial investigations, and code investigations. Running GPT-6.1 Sol on Ultrafast costs 1.2 times the price of standard GPT-6 Astra, giving near-Astra intelligence at high speed for about 20% more than Astra's standard rate. _Developers picking a speed tier for latency-sensitive features can track pricing shifts like this one on daily.dev._ ### What is OpenAI Auto-review and who can use it for free? Auto-review is a safety feature where a lightweight Luna-level model checks an agent's planned action against a user-defined policy before it acts, for example blocking submissions, emails, or sharing of personally identifiable information. OpenAI made Auto-review free for Codex and ChatGPT subscribers, a change benefiting over 5 million weekly active users. _Teams adopting autonomous coding agents can follow safety feature rollouts like this through daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [GPT-6 Astra Benchmarks: 99.9% or 62.7%? The Full ARC-AGI-3 Story](https://daily.dev/posts/gpt-6-astra-benchmarks-99-9-or-62-7-the-full-arc-agi-3-story-1dabqghdx) · Medium · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [GPT-6 Astra Is Here. Is AGI Actually Any Closer?](https://daily.dev/posts/gpt-6-astra-is-here-is-agi-actually-any-closer--nhqbauuhl) · Medium · 13 upvotes · 5 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#gpt](https://daily.dev/tags/gpt) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-don-t-use-astra-every-day-openai-developer-lead-tells-tns-why-uej4aa1nt) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"“I don’t use Astra every day”: OpenAI developer lead tells TNS why","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-don-t-use-astra-every-day-openai-developer-lead-tells-tns-why-uej4aa1nt","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-don-t-use-astra-every-day-openai-developer-lead-tells-tns-why-uej4aa1nt"},"datePublished":"2026-10-27T14:30:19.791Z","dateModified":"2026-10-30T14:00:19.238Z","description":"OpenAI's EMEA developer experience lead Vaibhav Srivastav explains why he uses GPT-6.1 Sol daily instead of the pricier GPT-6 Astra. 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