It’s no secret that I’ve fully embraced AI for my coding. A valid concern (and one I’ve been thinking about deeply) is the atrophying of the part of my brain that helps me code.

To push back on that, I’ve been learning Rust on the side for the last few months. I am absolutely loving it.

Why Rust? #

Systems level language #

Kotlin remains my go-to language. It’s the language I know like the back of my hand. If someone sends me a swath of Kotlin code, whether handwritten or AI generated, I can quickly grok it and form a strong opinion on how to improve it.

But Kotlin is a high-level language that runs on a JVM. There are structural limits to the performance you can eke out of it, and for most of my career1 I’ve worked with garbage-collected languages.

For a change, I wanted a systems-level language, one without the training wheels of a garbage collector.

New paradigms #

I also wanted a language with a different core philosophy, something that would force me to think in new ways.

I picked up Go casually but it didn’t feel like a big enough departure from the languages I already knew.

It just felt more useful to ask AI to generate Go code than to learn it myself.

With Rust, I could get code translated, but then I’d stare at the generated code and realize I was missing some core concepts and fundamentals. I loved that!

The first time I hit a lifetime error, I had no mental model for it. That confusion was exactly what I was looking for.

Coming from a GC world, memory management is an afterthought — if it requires any thought at all. Rust really pushes you to think through the ownership and lifespan of your data, every step of the way.

In a bizarre way, AI made this gap obvious. It showed me where I didn’t understand things and pointed me toward something worth learning.

Built with Rust #

Here’s some software that’s either built entirely in Rust or uses it in fundamental ways:

• fd (my tool of choice for finding files)
• ripgrep (my tool of choice for searching files)
• Fish shell (my shell of choice, recently rewrote in Rust)
• Zed (my text/code editor of choice)
• Firefox (my browser of choice)
• Android?! That’s right: Rust now powers some of the internals of the OS, including the recent Quick Share feature.

Many of the most important tools I use daily are built with Rust. Can’t hurt to know the language they’re written in.

Kotlin developers will feel at home #

Rust is quite similar to Kotlin in many ways. Both use strict static typing with advanced type inference. Both support null safety and provide compile-time guarantees.

The compile-time strictness and higher-level constructs made it fairly easy for me to pick up the basics. Syntactically, it feels very familiar.

How I’m learning Rust #

I started by rewriting a couple of small CLI tools I used to keep in Bash or Go. Even in these tiny programs, the borrow checker forced me to be clear about who owns what and when data goes away. It can be quite the mental workout at times, which is perfect for keeping that atrophy from setting in.

After that, I started to graduate to slightly larger programs and small services.

Main Resources #

There are two main resources I keep coming back to:

1. Fondly referred to as “The Book”. There’s also a convenient YouTube series following the book.
2. Google’s Comprehensive Rust course, presumably created to ramp up their Android team. It even has a dedicated Android chapter. This worked beautifully for me.

Using AI as a Rust tutor #

There are times when the book or course mentions a concept and I want to go deeper. Typically, I’d spend time googling, searching Stack Overflow, finding references, diving into code snippets, and trying to clear up small nuances.

But that’s changed dramatically with AI. One of my early aha moments with AI was how easy it made ramping up on code. The same is true for learning a new language like Rust.

For example, what’s the difference2 between these two:

let mut x_coord:      &i32
let     x_coord: &mut  i32

Another thing I loved doing is asking AI: what are some idiomatic ways people use these concepts? Here’s a prompt I gave Gemini while learning:

i'm learning Rust; specifically focusing on the concepts of mutability, shared
and exclusive references etc. This is from my notes:

> [!tip] There are individual concepts:
>
> 1. Mutability and immutability (through `mut`) keyword
> 2. There is References and borrowing (enabled through `&` and `*`)
>    - when you see `&` - immediately think reading/"borrowing"
> 3. Things get interesting when you combine `&mut` which is exclusive
>    references

what are some usecases in rust where we use some combination of the above. i
want to understand if i become a daily rust programmer, what are some idiomatic
commonly used patterns I should get familiar with?

Here’s an abbreviated response (the full response was incredibly useful):

Great question! Let me break down the most common idiomatic patterns you'll
encounter daily in Rust with these concepts:

Key Daily Patterns to Remember:

1. Default to &T - Use immutable references unless you need mutation
2. Use &mut T for in-place operations - Sorting, filtering, modifying
3. Clone only when necessary - Prefer borrowing over cloning
4. Method receivers tell a story - &self reads, &mut self modifies, self
consumes
5. Iterators are everywhere - Master .iter(), .iter_mut(), and .into_iter()

The beauty of Rust is that the compiler guides you - if you try the wrong
borrowing pattern, it'll suggest the right one. After a few weeks, these
patterns become second nature!

It’s easy to be doom and gloom about AI in coding — the “we’ll all forget how to program” anxiety is real. But I hope this offers a more hopeful perspective.

If you’re an experienced developer worried about skill atrophy, learn a language that forces you to think differently. AI can help you cross that gap faster. Use it as a tutor, not just a code generator.

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I did a little C/C++ in high school, but nowhere close to proficiency. ↩︎ 1.

Think mutable var to a “shared reference” vs. immutable var to an “exclusive reference”. ↩︎