rust

May 2026

Nine things, Space, Rust, Pi? Oh my!

An AI Hate Wave Is Here

Asked about backlash to AI, Superhuman Mail CEO Rahul Vohra — whose company makes an AI-powered email assistant — seemed unfamiliar with the premise of the question. After hearing about poor polling around AI, he responded: “We don’t really see that.”

Building Pi with Pi

Keep in mind that AI has not increased the number of people who need software, or the number of maintainers who can review it. It has mostly increased the amount of code and the number of projects competing for attention. Some of that is healthy, but a lot of it fragments effort that should be shared.

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST

I do wish to point out, of course, that the whole reason it was possible to experiment cheaply and come across this serendipity was because 9 months ago, faced with the choice to either do the bad easy thing or the good nothing, I chose to do the bad easy thing.5

Ask an Astronaut: 333 hours of Q&A footage with astronauts : I’m at a loss for words, just see it for yourself. Saving it for Lin Lin and myself.

Watch a neural net learn to play Snake : Mesmerising to watch, it does seem to abruptly stop occasionally. Refresh the page if it does.

Teaching Claude Why

Our final finding is straightforward but important: training on a broad set of safety-relevant environments improves alignment generalization. Capabilities-focused distributions of RL environment mixes are changing and increasing rapidly; it is not sufficient to assume that standard RLHF datasets will continue to generalize as well as they had in the past.

Idempotency is easy until the second request is different

Leave Me Behind : Adam McNeilly’s quiet end-of-an-era post ruminating about the good old days. While I understand their sentiments, and the human mentorship angle, I don’t agree with the overall negativity. You can certainly leverage AI tools to fast-track your learnings. Not everyone had access to great seniors and mentors. The job was never solely about writing code, although that was the allure. We were paid to collaborate and build to generate value for our users and employers. The need for that collaboration and thus human touch, has not gone away.

Torrix, self hosted LLM observability, no Postgres, no Redis

If AI writes your code, why use Python?

medium.com ↗

The argument from the title: Python’s ergonomics were optimized for humans, and humans are increasingly not the proximate authors. If the model is happy writing Rust, the case for the slower-runtime, weaker-typed alternative gets thinner.

The last twenty years of language choice were shaped by a single constraint: humans write the code, and humans are slow at low-level languages. That constraint is gone. Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey had Rust as the most-admired language for the tenth consecutive year at 72%, with Gleam at 70%, Elixir at 66%, and Zig at 64%. The stated preference was always there; the tooling finally caught up to the preference.

This reads like the strongest argument until you start unpacking it. What happens when the agent halts halfway through a refactor? When your context window runs out, or the provider doubles the price? Or for those 20% of times where it just doesn’t do the job?

The model writes what I want to read, and I still want to read the simpler thing. Use what you know best, optimise when the need actually arises. I say this as a Rust programmer and advocate, not everything needs to be in Rust. Rewrite It In Rust is enough of a meme already.

Why don’t we go a step further if we’re all-in on AI? Let models and agents invent their own language and let it optimise based on our preference.

Zed 1.0

zed.dev ↗

I have been daily driving Zed since February and it’s been really great, surprisingly polished. I have barely touched SublimeText in this time. It has built in Helix mode for editing and configurable shortcut keymap for JetBrains, VSCode etc to minimise learning curve. Best performing editor/IDE I have ever used. I’m a little skeptical of business model but they’re promising basic editor to be free forever and sell AI subscription to be a viable business. It’s open source anyway and the code is worth a look.

So we started over. Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU. That meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust.

That was a bold bet early on, glad it paid off!

Building our own foundations is what got us to 1.0, and it’s also what makes the next chapter possible. We’re actively developing DeltaDB, a synchronization engine built on CRDTs that tracks every change with character-level granularity. DeltaDB lets multiple humans and agents share a single, consistent view of the codebase as it evolves. DeltaDB will allow you to invite teammates into conversations with agents to review and evolve agentic code directly in the context from which it’s generated.

Fascinating, cannot wait to see where this leads.

The native IDE I’ve been waiting for years finally landed, on the eve of IDEs being made obsolete by models and agents. Oh the irony.