I have actually been doing this lately: iteratively prompting AI to write software and fix its errors until something useful comes out. It’s a lot like machine translation. I speak fluent C++, but I don’t speak Rust, but I can hammer away on the AI (with English language prompts) until it produces passable Rust for something I could write for myself in C++ in half the time and effort.
I also don’t speak Finnish, but Google Translate can take what I say in English and put it into at least somewhat comprehensible Finnish without egregious translation errors most of the time.
Is this useful? When C++ is getting banned for “security concerns” and Rust is the required language, it’s at least a little helpful.
I was 0/6 on various trials of AI for Rust over the past 6 months, then I caught a success. Turns out, I was asking it to use a difficult library - I can’t make the thing I want work in that library either (library docs say it’s possible, but…) when I posed a more open ended request without specifying the library to use, it succeeded - after a fashion. It will give you code with cargo build errors, I copy-paste the error back to it like “address: <pasted error message>” and a bit more than half of the time it is able to respond with a working fix.
i find that rust’s architecture and design decisions give the LLM quite good guardrails and kind of keep it from doing anything too wonky. the issue arises in cases like these where the rust ecosystem is quite young and documentation/instruction can be poor, even for a human developer.
i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.
i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.
I agree. The agents also need to mature more to handle multi-level structures - work on a collection of smaller modules to get a larger system with more functionality. I can see the path forward for those tools, but the ones I have access to definitely aren’t there yet.
I have actually been doing this lately: iteratively prompting AI to write software and fix its errors until something useful comes out. It’s a lot like machine translation. I speak fluent C++, but I don’t speak Rust, but I can hammer away on the AI (with English language prompts) until it produces passable Rust for something I could write for myself in C++ in half the time and effort.
I also don’t speak Finnish, but Google Translate can take what I say in English and put it into at least somewhat comprehensible Finnish without egregious translation errors most of the time.
Is this useful? When C++ is getting banned for “security concerns” and Rust is the required language, it’s at least a little helpful.
I’m impressed you can make strides with Rust with AI. I am in a similar boat, except I’ve found LLMs are terrible with Rust.
I was 0/6 on various trials of AI for Rust over the past 6 months, then I caught a success. Turns out, I was asking it to use a difficult library - I can’t make the thing I want work in that library either (library docs say it’s possible, but…) when I posed a more open ended request without specifying the library to use, it succeeded - after a fashion. It will give you code with cargo build errors, I copy-paste the error back to it like “address: <pasted error message>” and a bit more than half of the time it is able to respond with a working fix.
i find that rust’s architecture and design decisions give the LLM quite good guardrails and kind of keep it from doing anything too wonky. the issue arises in cases like these where the rust ecosystem is quite young and documentation/instruction can be poor, even for a human developer.
i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.
I agree. The agents also need to mature more to handle multi-level structures - work on a collection of smaller modules to get a larger system with more functionality. I can see the path forward for those tools, but the ones I have access to definitely aren’t there yet.