The Rust project puts out an article about how they're listening to their community https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/20/rust-challenges/

Except it turns out that article was drafted by an LLM https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1rz15t3/what_we_heard_about_rusts_challenges_and_how_we/obiwu24/

They claim nearly every line was rewritten by a human but I'm not sure how you could send a worse signal to your community about how much you aren't listening than having an LLM draft a post saying we're really listening, honest

What we heard about Rust's challenges, and how we can address them | Rust Blog

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

@cwebber What a weird debate here:
- This sounds like a LLM wrote it.
- Sure for the first draft, but it was rewritten to *match my style*!
- Your """style""" looks very much like a fucking LLM bro...

@cwebber

And once again the Zig language project shows, that there's a better way: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy

Code of Conduct ⚡ Zig Programming Language

@datenwolf @cwebber I considered learning Rust because I was looking for a modern systems language with modern tooling and without GC but the complicated syntax, the complex toolchain and a lack of a standard is pushing me towards Zig, this is another strong push in that direction.
@emilianosandri @datenwolf @cwebber I dabbled with zig about a year ago and I really liked it...
@emilianosandri @datenwolf @cwebber The horrible syntax of Rust is what kept me away too, and the slow compiler and ugly cross compilation didn’t help. Definitely going to check out Zig when I have time.
@cwebber @datenwolf Ha! I am starting to learn Zig this week then

@cwebber whew, glad I didn't hitch my goat to that bloating whale carcass

I'm disappointed in Rust, I really wanna use it and like it, but Jesus Christ they make awful decisions

@cwebber Oh for fuck's sake
@cwebber The real Rust was on their people skills all along, who knew?
@cwebber why not give it a metallic taste: "It wasn't just improved by humans, it was a deep rewrite"
@cwebber How will managers and bureaucrats of the future learn to write bland corporate pablum if they let the machine do it for them?

@maccruiskeen @cwebber you mock, but as a ‘get to the point’ nerd who also loves witty terms and clever turns of phrase, That Bland Corporate Pablum Shit is **hard**.

Like a couple years getting good at MS Access, never have I put so much effort into mastering something I never want to do again.

@cwebber "They claim nearly every line was rewritten by a human" smells the same as "I have reviewed all the code in this 40k lines monstrosity PR that I made with Claude"
@cwebber
Well, that further cements my decision to have nothing to do with it.
Especially after the stuff I've heard about the team that leads them.
Do you happen to have a link at hand for what you read / heard?
@kirtai @cwebber

@duke_of_germany @kirtai @cwebber Yeah, would be interested as well.

Did some digging and all I can find is that a few years ago some people were really pissed off that the Rust team was putting LGBTQ+ support stuff on the mascot in discord and expressing solidarity for Iranian protestors and human rights. They seem to do this quite unashamedly, saying they don't really care if people don't want them to be political or whatever because writing tech is a political act.

@crazyeddie @duke_of_germany @cwebber
Mostly from here though if you have more recent information I'd be interested.
Why is there so much mismanagement in the Rust foundation and core team?

Just to give everybody a perspective, read the following articles: The Core Team Is Toxic - HackMD On the RustConf keynote | Rust Blog Rust Foundation apologizes for trademark policy confusion • The Register Entire Rust moderation team resigns • The Register The RustConf Keynote Fiasco, explained Why I left Rust Rust: The wrong people are resigning Could anybody explain why is it? M concern is about how all this could potentially affect the future of the Rust language. Why have none of thes...

The Rust Programming Language Forum

@kirtai @duke_of_germany @cwebber Nope. Would appear there were multiple paths of drama around the same time.

That conference bullshit is fucked. Kind of thing that makes for a life nemesis--horror movie level nemesis.

"One of these days I'm going to bathe in their blood." No warning. Just one day you wake up and you're upside down and your life is draining out into a bucket.

@cwebber why are people convinced that “I rewrote it in my style” is a thing. Editing is hard. Changing the “style” of a large block of text is extremely difficult without literally rewriting it from scratch, at which point you should just… write it yourself.

Ask for a list of bullet points to cover if you really are incapable, though probably you shouldn’t be given the job of writing community announcements…

@cwebber I'm more and more convinced that there needs to be a complete moratorium on programming until this LLM shit dies in a fire or the FOSS community purges every LLM booster. Name, shame, and ostracize.
@cwebber If they rewrote every sentence, why did they need the LLM in the first place? Lies, lies, lies.

@cwebber idk if they realize but, blog posts are supposed to carry meaning

if you have a slop generator spew something out for you that is a most effective admission you actually have nothing to say

@cwebber oh good to know the project lead is just as rotten as the community
@SRAZKVT I've bounced off of learning Rust from a technical standpoint a few times now, what's the deal with the community? Maybe I'll have to write it off entirely.
Sarah's website - Stop telling me to use rust.

@SRAZKVT 👀 Thank you. I see a lot of myself in what you wrote. Your POV kinda makes me want to go back to using C as well. And I really dislike proselytizing -- religious, technological, or other.
@SRAZKVT @SharpCheddarGoblin I see you repeatedly self-insert into conversations about Rust to express your desire for it to fade into obscurity again, isn't that kinda self-harm?
@natty @SharpCheddarGoblin not my fault it pops up into my feed

@natty @SharpCheddarGoblin and i don't wish for it to fade into obscurity

i just want reliable and dependable toolchains and no ableism. but that's too much to ask for in 2026 ig

@SRAZKVT @SharpCheddarGoblin it's not your personal obligation to argue with every post that pops up tho

@natty unfortunately, i view reliable and resilient architecture as more important of a target than my own mental health

my mental health being better only benefits me and close ones, proper architecture and sharing knowledge of how we can make things better benefits everyone. pretty easy choice there

@SRAZKVT there's your problem

to make reliable and resilient architectures you first need functional mental health

"Sacrificing" by burning out is not heroism, it's depressing to see

@natty sorry but i just cannot stay still when everything is blowing up around me and i know how to at least somewhat fix up things

to me that would be immoral

@SRAZKVT you remind me of the internal slideshow we have in training resources https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/no-heroes/
Why heroism is bad, and what we can do to stop it

Discover Site Reliability Engineering, learn about team development, SRE toil reduction

@SRAZKVT @natty sarah, please take care of yourself. none of this is worth it at the cost of your own mental health
@lumi @SRAZKVT people are already burning out en masse, which is partially what brings us here

I know autistic creatures treat their special interest as if it were their moral obligation to keep the infrastructure alive, but sacrificing oneself to do that just creates a really cursed bus factor probability distribution
@natty @SRAZKVT it's a very unfortunate situation, and i think one way this could be solved is to band together and support one-another

feeling like you're alone is a very quick way to burn out and get depressed
@natty @SRAZKVT also, more so on the topic of rust. i used to be one of those insufferable people that kept spouting that c is a legacy language and whatnot

it's not worth it, a programming language is not at all a good reason to burn bridges and isolate yourself

since then i've learned to appreciate c a lot, and learned zig as well. there is a reason people love these languages, and there are reasons people love rust

i also met a few really amazing people by shifting my views a bit

all that being said, i do still criticize rust a lot. there are many things that are not ideal with it, but it's definitely not all bad (in fact, i love rust as a language, and all these issues just make me sad and want to fix it)

it's important to pick your battles, and i don't think this one is worth it

@natty @SRAZKVT

to make reliable and resilient architectures you first need functional mental health

Eh not really. There are multiple examples of experts with failing mental health (or health in general) maintaining their skill up to the end.

@cwebber Fuck. This just sucks so much.
@cwebber ugh, as someone who loves the rust programming language, it's been so depressing to see everything around it progressively get worse

there are many reasons why i love rust:
- having a haskell-like type system is super nice
- mutable xor shared is a very good idea
- the borrow checker is great to work and promotes having simple ownership graphs
- have a crate as the basic compilation unit, rather than a rust file, is a very sane trade-off, and i like it more than having per-file compilation units
- the culture around correctness is very nice
- rustfmt creating a very consistent way to use rust
- embracing inclusivity from the start

there is a reason why i have "rust is my favorite dirty haskell" on my profile

but then, there are a lot of things which are very bad:
- being co-opted by corporations very quickly
- embracing github and discord
- no stance against proprietary software
- no stance against centralization
- crates.io is very centralized and does not play well with distribution package managers
- cargo being the one blessed build tool, rather than embracing variety
- rust applications being annoying to package properly in distributions

seeing people who i used to respect a lot, like fasterthanlime[0][1] and niko matsakis[2][3][4] embracing the slop machines has also been very depressing

it really makes me look more in the direction of embracing c and zig, but those have their own issues

there is a lot to like about zig, and the project itself seems to have a moral compass[5]. the compiler has a stance against llms and moved away from github. sadly the zig ecosystem does not seem to share this stance. for example ghostty[6] embraces it

0:
ewie.online/posts/20260214-arborium-is-ai-slopw/
1:
github.com/facet-rs/facet/tree/main/.claude
2:
github.com/nikomatsakis/zulook
3:
github.com/nikomatsakis/retcon/tree/main/.claude
4:
github.com/nikomatsakis/dada/tree/main/.claude
5:
codeberg.org/ziglang/zig#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy
6:
github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md#ai-is-welcome-here
Arborium is AI slopware and should not be trusted - Evie On-Line

It would be an understatement to say that I am mildly interested in syntax highlighting. While I have yet to write a full-fledged parser myself, my blog

@lumi @cwebber Did not know that ghostty embraced AI. Just uninstalled it and switched back to Kitty which is great. Also looking to replace keepassxc because of that.
@marcusxms @cwebber even worse is that ghostty has this harmful stance saying genai code is good while genai art is bad

this has potential to split the movement. we should be against
all of it
@lumi @cwebber Agreed. Also glad to see there's a :no_ai: custom emoji, now I just need that on the instance I'm on.
Shrig 🐌 (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Oh yeah btw. I made this No AI icon yesterday because I didn't fancy any of the other ones out there when I needed one. It's yours now too 😎

this godforsaken website
@lumi @marcusxms @cwebber does it? I feel like opposing some of it is still an Overton window shift to better?
@natty @marcusxms @cwebber opposing some of it is good, but i don't want the focus to go towards a specific usage of genai, while then ignoring the others
@lumi @marcusxms @cwebber I think it's a good start to refuse the drive-by garbage people dump with agents

What I think the problem is with the policy is that it claims that the LLM problem is a skill issue and rejects the premise that it is a
very flawed technology with serious consequences
@natty @marcusxms @cwebber it's sadly something you see a lot in tech: ethical, environmental, social and political issues swept under the rug

and then only looking at the technical arguments

@lumi @cwebber @marcusxms genai code is bad bc code is art

much like some only view paintings and photos as only a way to make a wall less bland, there are people who consider code to be solely practical

@marcusxms @lumi @cwebber Arguably the Ghostty solution is at least kinda honest, Kitty silently goes Copilot commits
@natty @cwebber @lumi oh ffs. What about Alacritty? Or any recommendations?
@natty @marcusxms @cwebber gosh i hope alacritty doesn't become slopware
alacritty/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · alacritty/alacritty

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@natty @cwebber @lumi Switched to Alacritty - thanks for the head's up!

@lumi @cwebber, there are more people using AI and they are listed now somewhere (saw it, but has no link at the moment). Anyway, there's a discussion about Rust and AI that anyone can read and participate in:
https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/392734-council/topic/Project.20perspectives.20on.20AI/with/572399487

Personally I find it depressing as it tends to deprecate AI for non-maintainers only or something alike just to allow the AI pushers to still be there.

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