Earlier this year I got introduced to the concept of vibe coding. After dabbling with some tools , I settled on using Cursor for my Rust development projects. Rust is actually a great choice for AI assisted software development, because the compiler is quite strict but also helpful to the AI assistant. But it does mean you have to run “cargo check” very often. At some point I got quite a lot of crashes/errors when running a cargo command, where the AI assistant would just stop working due to a serialization error. I guess it had something to do with the relatively large output of cargo. The help desk at Cursor wasn’t able to provide a direct solution, so I tried to come up with my own solution.

I first created wrapper scripts that dumped the output of cargo to a temporary text file that the AI assistant could read. That actually worked quite well, but it created large amounts of temporary files. I figured I might as well build a proper solution. I heard about MCP servers before and I thought that this might be a nice way to provide access to cargo for AI assistants. This tool became Tool42. I added some other functionalities beside cargo as well and now I use tool42 on a daily basis. The only annoying thing is that I constantly need to remind AI assistants to use tool42 instead of cargo (even though I also used the system/user prompts that Cursor offers).

Check out the Github page: https://github.com/elan8/tool42

Happy coding !