This matches my experience with Astra so far too.

> I think I’m suspecting something is going “wrong” in the training process. The model is greatly rewarded for succeeding on long-horizon tasks, but presumably there is very little punishing going on for “shitty code.”

My suspicion is that both OpenAI and Anthropic moved their RL agendas from "being rated as useful according to human feedback" to "succeeds at long horizon tasks" in the last few months, resulting in agents that are closer to AGI in an autonomous task-completing sense, but strangely bad at communicating.

The result is that they are amazingly good at long horizon tasks, computer use, solving difficult math/ARC-AGI type problems, but becoming weirder and weirder to work with.