I think it's hard to know what to make of that. Observations with little insight.

Maybe it just needed to be prompted differently? Maybe Astra starting from scratch could have done it? Maybe Opus was somehow trained more on the Golang implementation.

It's curious, but again little insights.

Could be. Feel at 6k commits there is a lot to be learned here, might be useful to compare code quality, approach taken by each model and assess whether what Astra created was truly unsalvageable.

Prompting wise, would be interesting to know how much steering truly happened across the project, if one wanted the model to truly work without detailed input, there isn't much that could be done to improve. How much was lined out and set I'd love to know, don't see it anywhere in the commits though, just the AGENTS.md and a few other docs files. "Port TS compiler, checker and LSP to Rust, never ask any questions" would be pretty funny though.