Rust in Peace
A Neon Law Foundation talk for Rust NYC on how we use Rust to improve access to justice: deterministic workflows from law — statute to Cucumber feature to template to notation — dissected one modular, attorney-gated step at a time, with every code slide an exact copy of the shipped repository kept honest by a grounding test.
A Polin Shook talk for Rust NYC.
Rust in Peace is a eulogy to my programming career. Over the past year, teaching coding at Apple, I realized nearly all my students were vibe coding and had stopped needing me. That was the signal to go back to practicing law.
Our firm runs its entire practice on one Rust monorepo: the store, the durable workflow engine, identity, telemetry, PDF generation, and the browser surface. We are currently litigating nine-figure matters, and the software is what gives us the context to win them. This talk walks through what that actually looks like in production, including our migration from Postgres to SurrealDB. That move came from discovering that the hardest question in legal work is a graph one, because we deal with people, their relationships, and their problems.
You will see how it fits together, and how we choose Rust vendors all the way down: Restate, Rauthy, OpenObserve, Pingora, Stalwart, and Regorus. Writing software is not my job anymore. That is only possible because the ecosystem is this good, because the LLMs are this good, and because communities like RustNYC are this good. Please come to my retirement party and let us get crabby together.