But we might end up with "work on my infrastructure" optimization that would be hard to reproduce.

Like that research that evolved an FPGA where some unconnected parts where crucial for the the expected behaviour.

https://www.eetimes.com/whatever-happened-to-evolvable-hardw...

Adding a few diverse hardware environments available for testing during the duration would mitigate this. Many companies wouldn't have any issues having infrastructure specific optimizations either. (Part of) Deepseek's big advantage over their chinese competitors was their intelligent use of the hardware, after all.