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← Rust in Peace

Six ways to know a change holds

Chapter 4 of 7 · Section 23 of 51

Sections

1. Intro

  • 1. Agenda
  • 2. Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program

2. The Rails Lesson

  • 3. Convention over configuration
  • 4. The database was a shared design
  • 5. Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
  • 6. Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
  • 7. Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
  • 8. "It works on my machine"
  • 9. How new all of this still was
  • 10. From Rails conventions to Navigator
  • 11. A eulogy for my programming career

3. Shared craft compounds

  • 12. Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
  • 13. Widely available — governed in the open
  • 14. A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
  • 15. Say it with your whole chest

4. Six ways to know a change holds

  • 16. One giant change deserves more than one glance
  • 17. The compiler asks whether the program can be true
  • 18. Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
  • 19. Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
  • 20. Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
  • 21. Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
  • 22. Three workshops, three people, one method
  • 23. Fast generation, slow enough verification

5. From Law to Workflow

  • 24. The goal — deterministic workflows from law
  • 25. Step 1 — read the law
  • 26. Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
  • 27. "It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
  • 28. Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
  • 29. Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
  • 30. Step 5 — signature is a modular step
  • 31. Step 6 — the filing, run durably
  • 32. "It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
  • 33. Why a workflow beats a prompt
  • 34. Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product

6. Rust All the Way Down

  • 35. We did not start all Rust
  • 36. From Postgres to Rust — with a bridge
  • 37. The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
  • 38. One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
  • 39. Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
  • 40. Rust reaches the places lawyers work
  • 41. I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
  • 42. Always the latest, always Rust
  • 43. Swap the seam — it still works
  • 44. The crates we actually run on
  • 45. Ethics is part of the stack
  • 46. The simplest developer environment I can get away with
  • 47. The online developer environment
  • 48. "It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
  • 49. Where we are today — live by August 19
  • 50. Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace

7. Wrap Up

  • 51. Take the method home
✓

Fast generation, slow enough verification

Vibe code quickly. Then keep it DRY, refactorable, covered, formatted, and explainable — six perspectives make the feedback loop faster, not heavier.

Presenter notes

The practical loop is short: state the behavior; ask the model for a small change; compile it; format and lint it; run the focused test; read the diff; explain the change to the persona who will rely on it. When the change is larger, add the wider test suite and the human review that match its risk. When one of those views disagrees, do not paper over the signal — improve the abstraction, remove duplicated logic, or split the change until the explanation becomes clear.

This is how rapid AI-assisted work compounds rather than decays. We keep the speed of generation while preserving the craft that lets the next person safely refactor, reuse, test, and trust what we just made.

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