AI-assisted development is all the rage nowadays. I'm sceptical, but really want to give these tools a fair shot. But then I look at what these tools actually manage to do, and am disillusioned: these tools can be worse than useless, making us net-negative productive.

Let's pick one of the best possible examples of AI-generated code changes. An example so good, that the Cursor Editor uses it to advertise on their front page.

A couple of days ago, Steve Klabnik published an article discussing Rust's Golden Rule, arguing that Rust's function signatures provide a clear contract that doesn't depend on the function's contents, which aids reasoning about the code. In particular, function signatures are never inferred.

However, the Rust language has evolved so that it violates this Golden Rule. While impl Trait return types by themselves are fine, they combine with auto-traits such as Send in an unfortunate manner. This is a noticeable limitation when it comes to writing async Rust code.