Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era

xutopia

Loco is a Rust framework that adopted all Ruby on Rails conventions and they're applied through and through. The naming of this project confused me.

poszlem

"Mostly Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, with one human steering by prompts. " I find it funny that I would happily use a version of this if I created it (with Claude), but somehow cannot get myself to use it since it's been prompted by someone else. I wonder what's that about.

danso

> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app: one blessed stack, one layout, one way to do each thing. The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code...Other frameworks ship a library. Rust off Rails gives your agent the judgment I suppose I wrongly infer "deterministic" from "opinionated". But this approach still doesn't particularly opinionated other than "AI agents are sophisticated and reliable enough nowadays to build a stable Rust app from Markdown instructions"

logankeenan

This already exists and it’s called loco https://loco.rs/

pjmlp

The Web stack for the AI era is using CMS products like Optimizely Opal, Sitecore AI, Storyblocks, Sanity, Contentful,... combined with Vercel V0.

tayo42

Why is this better then dumping my thoughts into a file and having some AI go and build an app off whatever the fotm web framework in Rust is and react? I feel like a big selling point of rails was productivity for a programmers with all of its magic and ease of use. But if your not reading the code,who cares? Ai should be smart enough to work with any format of notes?

nemothekid

I think my new tell for low effort sites is if they default to the standard Claude Design language. This site has all of it * Unnecessary badges * text-uppercase section headers * Randomly italicized words

roarcher

> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app [...] The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code. What exactly is the benefit of this? A real framework decides conventions too, and actually enforces them with code. This just sounds like a way to burn more tokens for fewer guarantees.

hmokiguess

I am so tired

recurseP

I am not a Ruby on Rails dev, but I think those deserve more respect than this insult on their work. DHH's lately statements are injury enough.

bennettpompi1

why does this slop have so many votes

uludag

It's such a shame that sleek looking sites and project depth aren't a sign of human effort and by extension longevity. For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!" Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.

rspeele

The "web stack" is a bunch of markdown files. It's more of a wish list than a framework. Also: "No line of the framework was typed by hand." So it's not even your wish list. I could prompt Claude "write down best practices for building web apps in rust, then build <my idea> as a web app in rust following those practices." How would that differ? I can't tell if this is a satire of "markdown engineering" or not. Poe's law in action.

pjm331

markdown specs are certainly the funniest way to claim to distribute software

mhermoso1993

Interesting, I wanted to migrate some of my app modules to Rust but was complicated without tools like this, now I could do a second shot on it

slowin

I wouldn't build a web app with a Rust back-end simply because of the compile times. Go is a better choice here because it will compile in seconds vs 10+ minutes for even a moderately sized Rust app. I also don't feel Rust's strengths shine very much in a web back-end. Go performance is more than sufficient and you don't need to call native code directly.

skrebbel

Ok so AIs can pretty reliably write tight for loops now. How the hell did we, as an industry, go from there to “we don't need to think anymore”? Just fart into the idea processor and register a tld amirite? Wtf is going on folks, can we lay it off already and start thinking and caring about thinking again?

SwellJoe

Slop all the way down.

rtpg

Can people please make something with the tools they are pitching before putting it out in the wild? Not the stupid useless field tests that no one uses. Make a real thing that gets used by more than 5 people. Then consider whether your thing is actually useful. Then maybe put it out to the world

drojas

This is an interesting experiment. Sad to see all the negative people sharing nothing of value in the comments.