> How is the token-cost-be-damned part in the latter example?

It's there, but...

1. The project owner figured out a way to minimize token usage for agent claim verification tasks.

2. Verification agents used older and much cheaper models, including local models for the most trivial things.

3. They could afford it anyway; but I think it's an inevitability that the token-cost for a task will approach some limit for some quality threshold - concurrent with the dollar-cost-per-token shrinking over time as better hardware comes out.

> In a new project, you don’t have that validation.

I'm still trying to understand that part of the project's history, actually. Obviously the HTML5+WebGL+Emscripten+Etc entrypoint was a "new" project; one of the first things they did was build their own means of verification, I just don't know how that part worked-out in practice (besides the agents dogpiling in on TODO.md).