What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)
A programming language designer explores the role of human developers in the age of LLMs, arguing that human oversight remains essential. The author posits that the Rust programming language is particularly well-suited for agentic development and discusses future improvements to support this paradigm.
Why it matters
It addresses the existential concerns of software engineers regarding the impact of AI on their profession and the evolution of coding practices.
As someone who has made a career of programming language design, I definitely have moments of existential dread about the rise of LLMs. I started coding in 5th grade on an x86 1 that ran at 5MHz, had something like a 5MB hard-disk and 512K of RAM 2 . Computers were really, really different back then. But honestly, programming wasn't. For all the advances in IDEs and programming languages and so forth, the basic act of entering code into a file has remained surprisingly constant 3 - right up until a few years ago, when everything kinda turned on its head. That's been exciting and empowering at times 4 but also scary and disorienting. Will my skills in programming matter? What about my skills in programming language design (such as they are)? This blog post is my attempt to answer those questions.
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