Welcome to Guiding Rust 🦀
This is a two-day course on Rust architecture and design patterns. It’s for engineers who read, review, and steer Rust rather than typing every line themselves. That situation is common now. Google said in October 2024 that more than a quarter of its new code was AI-generated, and the share has only grown since. This course is built for that setting.
The course assumes you’ve completed the first three days of Comprehensive Rust or know the equivalent material. It follows the same conventions: short pages and one idea per page.
We’ll practice three skills:
- Specifying architecture in types and signatures before code is generated.
- Recognizing design problems in generated code quickly.
- Turning a review finding into a prompt that fixes the design.
Schedule
Including breaks, each half-day session takes about 4 hours:
| Session | Segment |
|---|---|
| Day 1 Morning | Patterns for reading and steering Rust |
| Day 1 Afternoon | Project A: canscan, a CLI built with your agent |
| Day 2 Morning | Project B: framecache, a library built skeleton-first |
| Day 2 Afternoon | Project C: guardian, testing a stochastic system |
Day 1 morning is the only lecture block. The rest of the course is project work in pairs, using your own coding agent.
Target audience
Engineers with a few years of experience in another language: C, C++, Java, Python, or Go. You can read Rust with some effort. You work in a setting where an LLM produces much of the Rust source and humans are responsible for its architecture, correctness, and maintainability.
Non-goals
- Typing practice. You’ll write little Rust by hand in this course.
- Prompt engineering. Prompts appear only as the way to deliver a design decision you’ve already made.
- Covering all of Idiomatic Rust. We select the patterns that matter most for reviewing generated code and spend the remaining time on practice.