Can’t escape AI slop projects from meat proxies man. Every single open source project smells like Claude Code recently. Sad times.
It does make me sad that Rust is getting so strongly associated with slop. Personally I find it a really fun language to actually program in. The language being expression-based is actually quite handy, and is a concept I wish existed in other languages too. But it is also unfortunately the most sensible language for vibe-coding too because of the performance and guardrails.
“I built”
Don’t forget Claude in the contributor list!
… is an indication of tooling, not a scarlet letter that AI contributed to the source code. A dev can include AGENTS.md to support automated maintenance (pre-commit hooks, config scripts, Github actions) without making AI part of the software. Does Makefile mean GNU Make wrote your program?
“AI. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”
don’t forget “claude rules” on the github project
Why rust?
Rust is memory efficient and apparently safer. Think the barrier for entry is also a little higher than langs like C from what I hear.
Because wanna be programmers don’t want to learn a real language like c or c++ or anything else. Thats from what I hear from coworkers. I just use python, sql, and c++ for basic crap.
Why is c++ a “real” language and not rust? It’s a tool. All programmers need to know logic above a specific language.
I guess being memory safe makes it not real. It’s only a real programming language if you can easily cause a BSOD and leave attack surfaces from improper memory handling.
Lmao cpp is not a real language, it’s c with a bunch of OOP bloat on top. Imagine calling React a language.
I remember people hating on calculators, then computers, then the Internet. It’s going to destroy people’s ability to think on their own. Man were they wrong
You remember? How old are you man?
Yep, and it makes it harder to be motivated to actually work on OSS when your work can just be copied and sloppified into 10 other clones the next day
I once considered it a privilege to be able to program in rust. Even before, rust code can be quite terse
With LLMs now, I see code that gives my brain an anneurism and programming anti patterns that I didn’t know existed
Although I understand why LLMs prefer rust safety guarantees that make it difficult to shoot itself on the foot
TBF, AI allowed me to make extensions for browsers for my personal use which didn’t exists anywhere. So far, so good for me.
I wonder how the rustaceans feel about their language being associated with slop.
Probably the same way Unity feels about their game engine being associated with awful low budget shovelware games. The game engine was popular with low budget games because you can use the engine for free… But you have to display the “Made with Unity” splash screen for a few seconds as your game boots up. And notably, you can pay a licensing fee to remove that splash screen requirement. Basically the drug dealer special: Get the newbie game devs familiar with the engine for free, then charge the publishers to use the engine that their employees all already know.
The issue (which Unity didn’t initially foresee when they wrote their licensing terms) is that all of the shovelware games used Unity for free, and all of them had the big “Made with Unity” splash. So Unity very quickly became associated with super low effort shovelware games.
It just shows how safe the language is, LLMs have to rely on Rust to prevent all the memory bugs. Same for proof assistants
Yeah, it’s qualities that are useful for humans, too, like frontloading all the errors to compile time + good compiler error messages.
Like, I’m annoyed that people will be irrational about it, much like they associate Rust with rewrites in permissive licenses, even though it is just a tool. It entirely depends on how you use the tool.
But irrational people gonna irrational. Not much you can do about that…
Especially when Go is superior for AI generated code 🤓
I used to program in Rust. It’s a great language. I don’t do that anymore because %99.99 of Rust projects are slop nowadays.
What? Are you serious? A lot of LLM-generated text is in English too, let’s learn an obscure conlang and stop speaking English.
You know that’s not the same
How is it not?
English is the universal language. Rust isn’t. Using rust is a choice and not mandatory.
English is the universal language.
No, it isn’t. But ignoring the chauvinism there, okay, replace English with any other language that LLMs can speak.
So instead of fixing the balance with your human Rust code, you instead associate the language as slop because people choose it for their slop projects since it’s much safer and fast?
If anything, the slop projects working efficiently and not crashing every 5 minutes is the best proof you can have that Rust is uniquely great at what it offers, every language should aim to protect the program from its weakest link programmer which is AI in this case
Language isn’t slop. Where did I say that? I literally said it’s a great language.
What criteria for using rust is now not fulfilled anymore because slop uses rust? seems like you used the language for gaining Internet points
To be honest it’s not rust. It’s more like a mentality thing and probably not logical.
It’s like not raising your hand because it has become a Nazi salute. The act of raising your hand isn’t bad but it’s associated with a bad intention.
It’s the same with Rust. It’s a great language and I actually really enjoy it. But seeing so many slop projects with it made me feel bad. That’s it.
Genuine question from a guy that knows nothing. What is the issue with Rust?
Rust is more modern and gives compiler errors on bugs that would cause obscure, possibly very hard to debug errors in C and C++. That is an advantage for programmers, and also people using LLMs.
Still, it takes time to write good software, so it being written extremely quickly compared to the size is an indicator of slop.
Nothing at all. OP just wants to hang shit on people using Rust because OP has an axe to grind against AI - which, given half a chance, will elect to code in Rust (as it’s a well documented language). Therefore, Rust = sign of AI slop. (See downstream for their comments.
Rust is a fine language. Python is a fine language. OP needs a hug, some weed and BJ.
It’s the preferred language choice for lots of slop projects because it’s fast and memory safe. It’s the language that lots of people would like to have written their projects in but couldn’t because there is a steep learning curve, but LLMs let you slop out thousands of lines of rust without that.
Ok, clear. So, there is nothing wrong with the language itself, but its a good vehicle and indication for AI slop. Like the em dash of programming.
Exactly. Lots of good stuff written in Rust!
No in isolation but when they say they made something in rust in a month then flags start going up.
No, not at all. There’s some really good shit written in Rust.
“Written in Rust” as a slop indicator is like an AI scanner flagging a repo as AI-coded. Poor heuristic, infinite false positives. Which circles back to: if professional devs can’t tell the difference between AI-written and human-written Rust, the FuckAI crowd needs to rethink what “slop” actually means.
Or we need to admit that Rust is just…fucked :)
The only issue is that old people don’t like new things and like to complain where those become popular.
At this point when I see the words “I built” I automatically substitute it with “I cuck-coded”.
So what do people that -actually- did it themselves say?
I feel like “I built” has a level of pompousness implied that I think is correlated with AI bros. I’d normally use a verb like “made”. I know it’s a synonym but it seems less tooting-your-own-horn in connotation. I don’t think I’ve naturally said in a sentence that I “built” a tool.
Before I get strawmanned, no I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying you built something. I’m mentioning that there’s a minor difference in connotation that leads to one verb correlating with vibe-coding. That’s all.
Nothing at all.
We’re entering a low trust era. I suspect there’s going to be less sharing and collaboration. Between dealing with entitlement, harassment of devs, slop code PRs etc…what incentive do FOSS devs have to share anything?
We’re going to see siloing on one end and people using AI on the other to make their own shit for themselves. Everything else in the middle will be a no man’s land.
Big tech was already hoarding, FOSS was already under pressure from VC-backed “open core” bait-and-switch models, and maintainer burnout was already a crisis. Now we get to deal with the FuckAI crowd asking “papers please” every 5 mins too?
Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll make for me and mine or if you pay. No good deed goes unpunished.
That kind of matches my experience as well. I’m pretty neutral on AI made apps, maybe leaning a little negative, but a few months back I needed something quick for myself and didn’t have a lot of time, so I had Claude make something just for me to use. The app worked pretty well, and I thought that maybe it would be useful for some other people, so I offered it up. No expectations, no pressure to use it. I was upfront right from the start that it was AI created; I didn’t try to hide it. I got attacked relentlessly for using AI to make it. I had to delete the post just to make it stop. That really makes me not want to participate any more, even for the Human made stuff I do, since even a little suspicion seems to be enough to bring out the mob.
🎶 No good deed goes unpunished. No act of charity goes un-resented. No good deed goes unpunished, that’s my new creed. 🎶
I brought XXXXX into existence
And I can take it out of this world, too
I considered to add that into my substitutions extension, but there might some unforeseen (albeit funny) consequences :D
Lol. “Look at it go on my personal project, wow I could never! I am a title worm! Go Sam Altman!” It really does work. What a great term haha
“Nothing leaves your device!”
Which would you pick: a SAAS option, or open source vibe coded option? This is a hypothetical, so none of the “neither” crap, just which one are you more likely to pick first.
“Curious to know what others think!”
I’ve made an open source hello world calendar app in a month in Rust. This language is so hard to understand for me, and I wrote C code for microcontrollers for a living some days of my life… Just can’t wrap my head around it.
Guess I’ll have to go buy socks and take HRT to finally be able to learn Rust.
Have you read the book? It’s a good read and it’s how I learnt. I went from knowing 0 Rust to knowing enough to start working on my projects. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Just keep going, the socks and HRT are a random byproduct, not a necessity.
Its just loot that drops when you level up, trust the plan
what made it easier for me was to think of it as design by contract. if you start by describing the interfaces, you can basically autocomplete the functionality.
i wrote a driver for an i2c device in rust because i needed to sanity check my c implementation, and after defining the types of each register i wanted to use i could just ignore types entirely because it all became implicit.
not saying i particularly like how much magic there is in rust, just that i get it.
It’s unfortunately on YouTube, but I always found this explainer quite helpful to understand the core concept of ownership/borrowing: http://intorust.com/
(You can skip the first two chapters.)
It just is a different way of thinking and especially veterans struggle with it, because they’ve got all these patterns in their head that don’t work very well in Rust.
