It all started with a post on X I made, more than a month ago

is anybody doing vibe coding in rust?

— DebamitroChakraborti (@debamitro) March 27, 2025

Based on the responses, I knew I had to try it out. So I started looking for a project to do.

The project

A few months ago, I had vibe coded a tiny python project which classified Gmail messages by size. I decided to create a Rust version of it. I thought if I succeeded, it would be easier to distribute as a desktop application.

Choice of UI framework

I tried out iced which both Cursor and Windsurf seemed to understand. I was actually surprised to see Rust vibe coding working out, even though I used a counter increment/decrement app for the test drive. But after that I started some digging, and wanted to try out gpui. I think I was inspired by Zed where this framework was born. And I liked its simplicity.

Adventures with gpui

My first attempts to generate working gpui code using both Cursor and Windsurf were quite rough. Nothing was compiling, and I had to correct almost all of the code in order to get going. Once the build succeeded, I didn’t want to stop. My UI needs were simple enough, and all I needed was a window with a button. Everything else was going to be done by a local http server.

The great thing about gpui is that if you know html and tailwindcss you can create gpui UIs. There is only one building block, and it is called ‘div()’ for obvious reasons. Everything else is done by adding style classes.

The server

This was the guts of the project. I am glad that I chose rocket for this part. Windsurf glided through this part with minimum issues.

And weeks passed

I kept going on with the project, falling into the rabbit hole of Rust aided by AI coding tools. I should say that I was mostly finding out what code to write, and using AI help to fix build errors. There were some things like tokio and rocket that I didn’t need to think about - AI coding tools know them well.

Current state of the project

Last week I managed to upload a MacOS .dmg file with the app to the github repo. It is open source, although I plan to upload pre-built Windows and Linux binaries as well, for ease of use.

Conclusion

A few years ago I actively spent 6 weeks learning Rust. At that time I could compile a few lines of code after spending an entire day! I used to tell people that if you want to become a philosopher go learn Rust. Fast forward to today, I am at least 3x more productive. I didn’t learn any more Rust in these years - I didn’t even touch it. But I have the power of AI a.k.a. ‘vibe coding’. And even though it is not an expert in Rust yet, it knows more than what I had learned in those 6 weeks.