How I AI - GPT-6 Astra is a banger - here’s everything I’ve built

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

I got early access to GPT-6 Astra: when I say this model broke through tasks I couldn’t crack with 5.6 Sol or Fable, I mean it specifically: the ChatPRD product intelligence feature, building 3D games, the hardware hack, and a handful of one-shot coding projects I’d tried and failed on repeatedly.What you’ll learn:Why Astra’s computer use feels different, and which production tools I’m trusting it withThe one feature I’d thrown every model at for six months, and what finally got it to 90%How I’m using browser use for QA, not building, and what it found that I would’ve missedWhy I think UI is genuinely back, and what that means for SaaS and MCPsThe hardware hack I’d been chasing since GPT-5.5, and how Astra finally cracked itWhat Astra built me in Blender in one shot, and why 3D is my new capability benchmarkThe AIM-style Mac app Astra made in one shot, and what it signals about desktop development nowAn honest take on speed, cost, and whether Astra is worth making your daily driver—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) GPT-6 Astra overview(03:44) Browser/computer use test on my CRM(09:08) Flora thumbnail generation(13:00) Browser use for QA(15:20) Coding: ChatPRD product intelligence feature, finally one-shotted(18:36) Hardware hack: Divoom MiniToo CLI and live streaming display(22:23) Building an AIM-style Mac app(24:24) Blender and 3D assets: Barbie Bench and the kids’ family app(28:52) Summary: what Astra is great at and what to try first—Tools referenced:• GPT-6 Astra:• Codex: https://openai.com/codex• Flora (node-based AI image/video editing): https://flora.ai/• Figma: https://www.figma.com• Blender: https://www.blender.org• GPT Image 2: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-image-2• Divoom MiniToo: https://divoom.com/products/minitoo• cxo.dev: https://www.cxo.dev/—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].

We are going to the stars today because, yes, today GPT6, Astra is live. Well, it's live for daybreak customers. It will be live for the rest of us very soon. I was lucky enough to get some early access to test the model. And this has been the model in the last six months. And, you know, maybe I sound like a broken record, but this is the one that has made me actually feel more ambitious. It has crushed some of my standing task. that Fable couldn't figure out.

Even my beloved 5-6 soul couldn't figure out. This model, GPT-6, one-shot a bunch of them. I'm going to tell you what this model is, what opening I says it's great at, and I'm going to show you some pretty incredible things. I've built with it, including, yes, hacking this dumb computer again. Let's get to it. Okay, I don't want to spend too much time on the blog post.

We can link to it in the show notes. You all can go read it. TLDR, state of the art on basically everything. We got the science, math. coding, knowledge work, not being annoying, being fast, computer use, all the things. So Open AI is positioning it as its most intelligent and aligned model. Huge jumps, particularly on frontier math, a big jump there in mathematical ability. The big thing that they're calling out is computer use and the use of software. So you're going to see this in today's episode,

but it is so good at computer use, not just browsers, but Excel, Unity, Power BI, Blender, Jupiter, document editors, like, kind of everything. So we're back. SASS is back. Product's back. Buttons are back because now Astra can use it. It's really good at producing work artifacts. They've done a lot of work to make work artifacts match your style, match your brand, match your voice, etc. And then again, autonomy, steering, all that kind of stuff is very good. They've really focused a lot on kind of time saving on common tasks, again, because of computer use. And so, this is a little like sneak peek into I think like we're all spending a lot of money on tokens and these models are feeling pressure to come up with an ROI model and I think you're going to hear a lot about them talking about Astra in terms of computer use and time saving right like apartment hunting can go down to 10 minutes from six hours I'll show you an example of generating thumbnails again something that takes us like an hour down to a couple minutes completely hands free and so a lot faster a lot more efficient and kind of able to do what they say real work. They really call out presentations, spreadsheets, documents, and software as

great use cases for Astra. But let's look a little bit at kind of some of the numbers. So automation bench, again, double Sol's reported score. So, you know, a lot higher on automating tasks. Let's look at coding. Deep Swee a little bump up here against 5-6-Soul. But again, combined with computer use, you're going to be able to do a lot more really interesting things. Math is a big story here. So big jump in Frontier Math Tier 4. And then let's talk about price and can you get it? So it's rolling out.

First, it's going to go to Enterprise customers with daybreak access. I got a little bit early access so I could test the model and tell you all about it. But over the coming days, it's going to be rolling out to GPT Plus Pro and Enterprise. in the API and an AWS, and then pricing $10 per million input tokens and 50 per output tokens, and fast mode will be fast. So it's a great model. You're going to want to use it. And I just want to get that out of the way so you know what it is. And then let's get into how amazing it is starting with computer use. So now that I've told you a little bit about what Astra is great at, let's see it in action. Now, the number one thing I covered when talking about the high level of the

model is how good it is at browser use. And I am telling you, I am a browser use maxer here. I'm a computer use. Maxer here. I love browser use. I love computer use. But, and I've been using it a lot in codex generally, but I will say Astra has taken my computer use to the next level. I want to show you a couple examples of some things that I've done with computer use that I think are really, really, really useful. The one I was really surprised by is how good it is. that complex web UI and managing pretty complex nodes and interactions and doing it really well. So let me show you an example of what I mean here. So this is our CXO.dev CRM and we are starting to get leads. We launched this business last week and we're getting a bunch of inbound. And we want to

filter those leads and then determine whether or not they should be sent to me or sent to my business partner, Zach. And once they are determined, if it should be me or Zach and it's like I get the big fancy enterprises. He gets the like technical startups and we kind of divide and conquer responding to leads one-on-one. We haven't given that to the agents yet, but we're going to do it live here. So we use this kind of built into our CRM adio, node-based workflow builder to build out the assignment logic, do things like prompt to determine Claire or Zach and then route it to different Slack messages and different CRM attributes.

I found myself sitting here and like futzing with these buttons one off. I couldn't figure out like how to infer the right objects from the responses, the AI responses. I was just getting really frustrated. I spent an hour here. And then I was like, uh, computer use. Of course computer use can do this. And so I want to show you what that looks like. Okay.

So instead of dragging and dropping all this stuff, I'm going to bring up my chat where I talk about the CRM with. codex and I would say, hey, I have a workflow open to route leads to Zach or I. I want as part of this flow to generate with a custom agent, AI, an email that is custom to the lead submission authored from either Zach or I, depending on who is custom. it's routed to and invite them to schedule with our calendar link, plus a bit about why we're excited to chat with them. Can you update the workflow in Chrome to do this? Thanks. Okay, so what we should see Codex start to do is actually open up Chrome, takeover Chrome, and start building out new nodes, new logic, new prompts, and route all of this stuff, reconnecting the right nodes. And here it goes. So you can see it's adding a new object to the AI generation that we're doing, who the email is going to, what the email subject is, what the email body is. I'm guessing, look, there's no hands. I'm not doing

any of this. And it's going ahead and going in this like fairly complex node-based app. And figuring out where to make the changes include things. And I think ideally, it's going to show an email draft from Claire or from Zach to review and for us to ultimately send. And so that's going to send to our Slack channel. And then we can copy and paste that and email it to the prospect. You know, the other thing, what I'll probably do here is have it actually send the email after we feel like this is really good. But again, this kind of thing, just like typing and thinking takes forever. And before Astra, I mean, really before GPD-56, but certainly before Astra, I really just didn't feel like browser use and computer use could navigate these nodes as well. And now I found that it really can.

And I just am hands off my computer all the time now. And it's a really fascinating new way to think about interacting with your computer interacting with websites. And I think about this, We, you know, we all said no UI is the next UI. And we had all these conversations about MCPs and CLIs. And what's so fascinating is now we're at this moment. We're actually like, UI's back, baby. Like SAS, this might be your savior because humans really do like a button. And now that you can get AI to click buttons for you and use a UI for you,

you sort of don't have to think about these CLIs and MCPs necessarily if the right. expression of your product is more of a UI-based thing. So I really do think computer use is kind of incredible. I'm going to let this keep running. I'm going to give another example of something kind of completely fresh that I haven't done yet, but I think it's going to do really well, which is, I'm going to say, we do a lot of thumbnail editing for our podcast in Flora. I have Flora open in Chrome right now with all of our podcast thumbnail upscaling workflows. I'm going to going to drop you a couple images from the podcast I'm recording live right now. And can you generate the images that our designer Naomi would need to actually generate the thumbnails for

this podcast? And then I'm going to take, I took some photos earlier today. So I'm going to drop right before I started this, I'm dropping really high quality photos of your friend Claire looking super excited about Astra because I am. And I'm going to send this and we're going to see if it opens up Flora, which again is sort of this like node, node workflow based AI editing tool for images and videos. I'm going to see if it can navigate that because again, I haven't done this before. And so I want to see if it actually works and can do that well. So it's going to inspect the thumbnail workflows that I already have open in Flora and then use these three photos to prepare the image assets Naomi needs. You can see here, this is our kind of like workflow. It looks

cuckoo bananas. This is not super well organized. As you can see, we take like kind of normal photos of me recording the podcast or our guest recording the podcast and then we make them like glowy and look fabulous because I'm sorry, but that's what YouTube says you like. It says you like this glowing purple hair, Claire. I wish you liked normal office lighting Claire, but you like purple, glowing hair, Claire. And so what it's going to do is it's actually going to take these new images that I dropped, navigate this app, import these images, and hopefully generate us the videos that we want that you'll see today when you come to the podcast. So I'm going to let that run. We're going to come back to it once the nodes are being generated. Okay, so let's watch

what it's doing. It took this imported photo of me that I just took in photo booth. It's going through and drawing a node, selecting the image generation model that's going to use. We use GPT image two. We used to use nanobanana, but we actually really like GPT image two. It's selecting aspect ratio. It's putting in the prompt based on other prompts we have. And it's going to go ahead and generate that. And I think it's going to do it for all three of these images. And again, this is something that our designer, Naomi, who's fabulous, does by hand every time. It's sort of mindless. And it takes a little bit of effort to drag the nodes, get it all organized. Also, we love flora, but it's kind of like chaos rains here. So anything that can help us

reorganize these nodes and keep them in check can be very, very helpful. And so what we're probably going to do is have Codex now generate all these images. And then Naomi's job, like all humans, is just to have good taste and make sure that the model doesn't make my face look insane or give me extra fingers or give me like an uncanny valley look. But you can see here it started generating one image. It's going to go ahead and generate. the next. And so you can just think of this as two examples, this like complex CRM workflow node builder and using Flora to generate assets and do prompting as something that really benefits from this UI, but does not benefit from humans using their fingers and typing prompts and dragging things

to make the UI. And this is where Astra really, really shines. And so I do spend about 90% of my day sitting here watching Astra use my computer and specifically use Chrome to navigate websites and applications that I really love. As a side note, another use case that I use for Astra and browser use that I think is really helpful for software developers in general and we'll get to coding at a minute is just QA. And so recently I was working on stabilizing the main chat PRD the chat experience with Astra. And we were chasing down some like race conditions and some weird edge case things in streaming persistence and all this kind of stuff.

We finally got the code shipped and the PR shipped. And I was like, can you just like test this in Chrome? And what was really awesome is it just pulled up the preview branch. And then it started clicking through testing, sending chats. And what was really helpful about browser use here is it was inspecting the console, checking for error logs. It was doing things like race conditions. It would like refresh Chrome. It would do all this stuff that would be very tedious and hard to execute as a human, but was super useful as a QA. You can see here, it actually ran for an hour and 45 minutes basically. QAing this branch. It found a couple issues when you're

navigating. It fixed some things. It specifically looked at some race conditions and was really awesome. So if you are not using browser use for QA, please do. I'm just going to go wrap our computer use action by looking at found and made the links kind of incredible. I'm actually just going to slack Naomi right now and say, good news. Astra made the thumb photos itself in Flora. Super cute. And then I'm going to send her an example of it. And like, this is so funny because think of a perfect example.

She's got an appointment. We need this thing done because you all like your model reviews, ASAP, and Astra made a great image for our thumbnail. And so this is just a really great example of a model and browser use and computer use, just taking toil off humans, even in the creative fields and letting you do your work a little bit faster and letting you impress your customers. you all are my customers, you're my clients, you're my audience, I love you, a little bit more. So very, very cool example. I love Astra, I love browser use. But let's get to some other fun stuff. Okay, let's talk about coding.

Yes, obviously, it's great at coding. But specifically, it has broken through a couple software engineering challenges that I have not been able to crack thus far with GPT-5-6 or with Fable or with Opus. specifically I for chat pyrd have been working on this feature this product intelligence feature that like sort of like sucks up all your product intelligence from like intercom and granola and linear and GitHub and kind of tells you what's going on what's trending what you need to do and in addition to creating those insights at trends it generates this sort of like auto wiki of the state of your product and I have thrown every model at this I'm pretty smart I kind of like architecturally know how it needs to work but it is complex it has to ingest data has to decide what it durably stores. It has to process it. It has to de-duplicate insights. It has to generate a wiki. It has to verify that wiki against external sources.

And like I, Fable did insane things with the architecture. Five, six just like got stuck on quality of insights. And I am telling you all, Astra one shot it. And I was like, it was like, this has been my experience this entire model, which has been like, it's been so hard to do these like very specific. tasks and I've tried them over and over and over again for six months. And then all of a sudden, Astros started to one-shot it. So I have been working on this product graph, product intelligence forever, and finally just gave it to Astro and like, can you, I have a branch open, can you fix it? And it built it. So it ingests data from a bunch of different sources, Intercom, Granola,

linear, et cetera. It pulls in those insights. It tells me what my top three priorities as a product person should be AI stalling. That was that race condition bug that we were figuring out. Self service cancellation is broken. And then people went on-prem Jira. Friends, please sponsors of the pod. People want on-prem Jira integration. It generates these kind of graphs over time. It tells you what opportunities. And I am telling you, I could not get any other model to get to this quality of insight out of a set of data. But my favorite part is it actually generate. the auto wiki well. So what this does is it sucks up all the information you can find about your product, in this case about chat purity. And it went and looked at GitHub. It looked at our documents.

And it just basically explains current function of all the product, recent changes, customer context, things that we need to fix. And then it exposes this via MCP. And I am telling you, this was like, I would call it three shot. One shot got it to 90 percent. And it was like two or three other prompts and finally it got it working. I had to polish the UI a little bit. But this is one of those things that just none of these models could do really well out of the out of the gate. It wasn't that they, I couldn't technically explain how I wanted to execute it. The architecture and whatever decisions it made on how to do it just resulted in poor quality. And it really, Astro really figured this one out. So it has super accelerated my personal product development, software development

on chat parity. But more important, It's let me build some fun stuff. So let's talk about coding, but make it fun. So you all know that I have been victimized by this thing. It's a divoom mini 2. It is really just like a Bluetooth speaker. It comes pre-installed with proprietary software. There's no API.

You can't crack it. You can't hack it. And GBT55 was the first one that even let me do the most basic thing on this little computer. This has been, this is my, my Everest. And already, I mean, the quality of what I've been able to flash onto this little device is amazing. Look, it's like Claire's little lab. It's figured out the pixel algorithm, which I had to reverse engineer. It was not easy. Um, so it's, it's already doing cute art. But let me show you what Astra was able to do here. So Astra built a little app that, that allows me to connect live to this device.

I can draw on the device using my mouse. I can change the thing. I can type, I love my subscribers. It's not going to spell check for me. I can do all that live, live streaming. But even cooler, I had Astra build me a CLI. now that it's totally figured out this thing, so that it can talk to me live about anything it wants. And so I can say, use the CLI again to tell our audience about the most recent episode of How IAI.

And so it can now go look now saying Codex is working, very cute. It's going to think really hard about what it's doing. It's going to find the latest How AI published episode, and it's going to stream an audience-friendly introduction to the CLI. I mean, again, it took me forever to get this thing to say hi with these previous models, and now I am truly able to do anything I want on this. So it's going to say Kudak is working. It's reading the Python that is the script.

And then hopefully, fingers crossed, it will stream a. message to you all beautiful subscribers about our most recent episode of Howway AI and let's just see if it gets it right. It got it right. The most recent episode is Grokbot versus OpenClaw, but let's see if it can actually stream it to the little computer. I'll show it to you all and we'll see it come in. Here it goes. It's streaming. So it's saying Claire shows us Grubbot. It's streaming in the episode information and then it should show us a super super cute little image about my many grok bots. But look at that. It just works totally out of the box. Look how cute that is. It even animates. Okay, this again is my Everest. It also says

inside PR support SOC2 monitoring and moving agents from OpenClaught. 36 minutes. A real agent tour. Find it in your podcast app today. This thing. We did. it folks. Next I got to root it. So that's next. The other really cool thing that I did with this that you all haven't seen is I hoped it into my codex hooks. So now it can tell me when codex needs something. And that brings me to my next use case. Very fun. Again, just coding things that I could not do before that I can do now. Let's look at it. It is building me a Mac app that turns my codex threads into a 90s style, AIMA Messenger.

For those of you who are young and beautiful and were maybe not even born when AIM was around. AOL Instant Messenger, it's how we olds used to chit-chat with each other on the internet. And it looked like this. It looked like this. And look at this thing that Astra made for me. Oh, he's made a 90s,

aim instant messenger style wrapper around all my live Codex threads. So all my buddies are different threads. Here's the dive-oom little mini app. So I can open up the chat that we're chatting there. It said it streamed the September 2 episode on Grokbot versus Ogunclaw. I can go back and send it another message. I can look at different things like I built this Astro podcast for review. So I can chat with Codex as if it's my little A&B. It's so stinking cute. It lets me have my screen name. Here's my away message, BRB, letting my agents cook.

And then you can see here I can say to that thread I was just working on, great job. That worked awesome. I love it so much. And it can, oh, it's already got an active, active writer. So it knows when it's actually working, which it is right now. It won't let me write. Little error. Again, this was one shot.

But again, this is the kind of thing that I want your mind to go to. Like things that you never thought were possible interacting on your computer, building software, building custom things. You can do one shot right now. It is so, so, so fun, so awesome. This brings me to another thing that you'll probably see a lot of the other reviewers do because a few of us that had kind of of early access to the model. This was spreading like wildfire is it's really good at generating 3D assets in Blender. This is something that they call out in their blog post, but is something that it does quite well.

And so this is going to be a step change in making 3D games. And I have another benchmark. In addition to have tiny computer bench, I have Barbie Fashion Designer Bench. And you all, again, are young, beautiful people so you don't know this. But there's this game. It was called Barbie Fashion Design. It came on a CD-ROM. And you had this 3D Barbie and you could design her clothes and, like, pick colors and prints.

And then you could actually print out clothes on this, like, printable fabric. And then you could, like, tape it together and put it on your Barbie. And then she walked, like, a 3D runway like this. And I know all of you are out there making space games and making race games and making RPGs and making all sorts of stuff. That is not for me. I am a girl. I want 3D Barbie bench.

I want Barbie bench, baby. You guys, I've tried over and over and over. to build this even before Fable, even before TPP 5. This is what Fable did. Real Uggo. Really just terrible, terrible stuff. And so this was my bench. I was like, can we use Blender and get Barbie Bench going?

And while I will say it is imperfect, it is certainly better than it was. So here's our Barbie 3D gal that we made here in Blender. You can see a step up from this, which is some progress. But let me show you exactly the game it generated, which I think is super cool. Okay, let me show you what Barbie Bench did. So now we have this stunning, gorgeous gal here. And you can pick different tops she wears. You can do shirts.

You can change bottoms. Now, Pants Bench, still not quite done. She's got these nice, like Christina Aguilera sort of chaps situation where her hips are showing. It's very chic. shoes, you know, leave something to be desired, but, you know, who doesn't like an other shoe? And then accessories, again, look at this queen, look at her glasses, look at earrings on and off, a little bow looking cute, a little lock as a purse. And then you can change her hair.

Let's just stunning, stunning, stunning, highlights slash pigtails slash whatever. You can change her skin tone. She can be beautiful. look at this and then you can have her walk the runway beautifully. I mean, nothing better than this. Now, is this perfect? No, you're going to see a lot of games that are a lot better than this. I think this like human 3D rendering is a lot harder.

This was one shot though, so I cannot complain. I want to show you a different one though that I think is a lot more beautiful and a lot more interesting. So you all know that I have been working on this. family app to bribe my children to do their homework. And I asked Astra to turn this app into a 3D journey where my kids could walk to the library, for example, and say, I read 20 minutes, collect my reward, or go to Moonwater Pond and see what my weather is, my emotions are today, doing a lot of like SEL stuff in my house. So again, like walking through this and look how beautiful all this is. How so super cute. You can use keyboard control, which I'm using right now. I'm sure

Astra would be really good at controlling this as well. I mean truly one shot. I did not code any of this. I just actually said, can you make this a 3D, you know, journey where you can walk through different places and it did this out of the box and it's so stinking cute. It's so cute. I would never be able to do something like this. Never, never, never. And Astra made it totally possible. I love it so much. It makes me so excited about what the future of building products is, what the future of building things for my kids are, personal software, all those things. I am just psyched about Astra. Okay, and to wrap it up during one of the breaks, our designer said, I have to go to a meeting. I'm not sure if we'll do thumbs in time. So I did ask Astra to take over my computer and actually use Figma to make thumbnails for this week's episode. Let's see what it did. Look at that YouTube classic. This face. Maybe this one will go live. Again, this has been something that computer use has been quite terrible at. To date, I have not gotten it to use. Figma very well, but look at that. It did it. Pretty incredible. All right. So to take a step back,

Astra, GPD6 is a banger. What is it good at? One, it's good at computer and browser use. What should you use that for? Navigating complex UI, lots of buttons, lots of nodes, lots of little fields, things that you don't want to fill out. Really, really, really exceptional at that. I used it in my CRM to build new pipeline workflows. I used it in Flora to generate thumbnail images. And then you saw I used it in Figma to actually put those thumbnail images together so that we had thumbnails for this podcast. We'll probably polish them, but truly not bad. On the coding side, it's going to help you get a lot more ambitious. So it one shot a couple things that in the past these models just could not do.

One was parsing through a lot of unstructured data deduplicating and driving insights out of that and then generating a great UI for us in chat pardee to share those insights with our customers about their own price. product. The second one was this guy, hacking hardware, please hack your hardware, hack this, hack your Bluetooth light bulbs, hack, hack, hack, hack, this guy. Just being able to interact with hardware and the real world is such a fun thing. And it's been a step change in this model in my experience and I've been working on this for a long time. Up level in your ambition on what kind of things you can code. So like website vibe coding is over. We can all do that. Let's do 3D games.

Let's do Barbie bench. I'm going to do this 3D game for my kid. Or let's do desktop apps like this AIM style messenger that wraps codex and does something pretty incredible and lets me interact with my codec threads in this really fun UI. Again, something I would have never been able to build in GPT6. One shot it. I really do love this model. I will just say like meta things.

It's not annoying. It's kind of slow, but like not too slow. I'm happy with it. It gets the stuff done. This is going to be my daily driver. I love her. So that has been my review of GPD 56. We will do a follow-up episode comparing 5-1 to Fable 51 and a couple other than new models.

We'll do the how I AI bench. We'll do the blind Claire taste test. But for now, as soon as you get access to GPD6, you should be using it. And please show me what you build. Thanks for joining How IAIAI and I cannot wait to see what you do with this new model. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts.

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