Post by @ekuber@hachyderm.io

2026-07-23 16:00 UTC

I've seen several people express dislike towards Rust (the project or the ecosystem) due to being opposed to the use of LLMs and a perception that Rust is used by LLM users. It feels deeply unfair having spent the last decade trying to make the Rust compiler talk to people as humans, having that work be incidentally useful to LLMs, and that somehow reflecting poorly on the project. It's like if someone looked at the textual TTS optimized output we've been working on to improve accessibility, and criticized it because it could make it slightly easier on LLMs too.

Replies (8)

@ekuber@hachyderm.io 2026-07-23 16:33

FWIW, no one owes me anything, and me seeing the equivalent of two people shooting the shit at a bar between each other should be none of my business. But social media *isn't* a bar, and one can have a much wider audience than one thought, and reach people you wouldn't say that to their faces. Specially when the bar has 10 thousand of your closest friends, your pithy comment will escape the room.

Open ##4313644
@emilyskidsister@hachyderm.io 2026-07-23 16:48

@ekuber@hachyderm.io software should be bad so robots can’t use it is sure a take

Open ##4313648
@benjamingeer@piaille.fr 2026-07-23 17:02

@ekuber@hachyderm.io I’m a non-LLM user who likes Rust, and I’m grateful for the care and effort that’s gone into its compiler error messages, lints, and documentation. I see a lot of people on Mastodon who have come to Rust from Python or whatever, and are discovering how nice it is to use features like pattern matching, thanks to suggestions from Clippy. I think that’s part of the reason why Rust has become popular enough for people to try to get attention by doing silly things with it. There are always obnoxious people on social media, but there are also a lot of us here who appreciate the work you do. 🙏

Open ##5300091
@cliffle@hachyderm.io 2026-07-23 17:56

@ekuber@hachyderm.io yeah, that was an amazingly bad take.

Open ##5300093
@bamboombibbitybop@mastodon.social 2026-07-23 18:23

@ekuber@hachyderm.io I write Rust all day as my 9-5 professional job 100% LLM-free. We exist!

Open ##5300094
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems 2026-07-23 23:19

@ekuber@hachyderm.io as someone who's been out of the loop: what's the current LLM stance of the people who actually do the bulk of the work on the compiler (I don't care too much about the users downstream of the project)? i know some of these people and talked them in the past, and my conclusion at the time was "the usual Rust project conflict avoidance results in a compromise where nobody is happy". is that accurate? has that changed recently?

Open ##5300095
@beandev@social.tchncs.de 2026-07-24 06:41

@ekuber@hachyderm.io It’s the same strange debate that some people have about alt text (image descriptions). They refuse to provide descriptions because they believe it would be used to train LLMs, but they fail to realize that this is absolutely essential for the blind. Some people go too far in their aversion to LLMs and end up sacrificing others in the process.

Open ##5300106
@torb@hachyderm.io 2026-09-20 21:02

@ekuber@hachyderm.io I’m learning Rust now precisley because it feels more important than ever to have human understanding and a deterministic system help me get stuff right. The compiler and clippy have been *wonderful* in that regard, and it’s spirit (to me) feels like the opposite of LLMs.

Open ##5300107