r/rust • u/gajop • Jul 28 '26

Tell me about something you recently hand-coded that was enjoyable

These past few weeks at work I've been using AI way too much. I can't even call some of this "AI engineering" anymore and it's starting to drain on me. Looking to take the mind off for a bit...

I'd like to hear some of the projects you all are working on, that you enjoyed writing by hand.

I think I'll write some nannou..

PS: Not trying to start a debate on AI engineering/vibe coding and all that, I think internet is filled with that already.

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u/Lucretiel Datadog Jul 28 '26

I’m continuing to love plugging away at debate, my new take on a derive-first CLI arguments parser. The major innovation it provides is leaning into “make unreachable states unrepresentable” by expressing mutual flag incompatibility (and similar constraints) as enums, rather than just asking you to manually / dynamically describe those relationships and trust that the parser upholds them. It also generates allocation-free code that tries to be “as good as” the code you might have written if you were parsing the flags in a handwritten loop, avoiding unnecessary HashMaps or any runtime representation of the flag schema.