How I Use AI to Build a 55-Crate Rust Project (Honestly)

I build Temps alone. The codebase is 55 Rust crates. That's a lot of surface area for one person. So yes, I use AI assistance heavily. Claude, mostly. I want to be specific about how I use it, because the honest answer is more nuanced than "AI writes my code" or "I write everything myself." What AI is actually good at Boilerplate. Rust has a lot of it. Implementing a trait for a new type means writing the same three methods with the same signature patterns I've written fifty times. I'll describe what I need and let Claude draft the implementation. I read every line before it goes in, but the drafting is fast. Tests. Writing unit tests is often more tedious than writing the code being tested. AI drafts test cases quickly. I review them for completeness, add the edge cases it missed (there are always edge cases it missed), and move on. Documentation. Rust has rustdoc , and public APIs need doc comments. Describing what a function does in a comment is the kind of task where AI is faster t