It's an unconditional success no matter how you slice it.

~3 months start to finish and the price of 1 engineer for a year, to rewrite a critical infra codebase that tens of millions of user software relies on. Truly the goalposts keep moving. This kind of project would've have been 10x the effort and price a few years ago.

Yeah, crucially, a lot of such projects never get greenlit.

Claude building stuff means a lot of things that everybody wanted to do, just couldn't allocate the attention or other resources - now get built.

It's likely much closer to that price if you don't calculate with subsidized token pricing.

Once a model like Fable/Mythos is trained, that was used for this project, the inference costs are profitable. CapEx vs. OpEx. Every new Zig->Rust port of this caliber using Fable/Mythos costs the standard token price, it's not subsidized. The model already exists for the original CapEx, you can do 1,000 ports of this for standard token pricing.

What budget?

What are you talking about? What is the budget? Was there ever a deadline? Who ever decided those?

This couldn't be further from the truth. It was if anything severely under budget of you compare it to what it'd normally cost in engineering time.