I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and after a few in-office discussions with a coworker, I’m becoming increasingly convinced: Rust might just be the backend language for the AI era.

That’s a bold claim. But here’s my take.

Rust: Annoyingly Strict, Gloriously Reliable

If you've ever written Rust, you know what I mean when I say it's not exactly a cuddly language. The compiler doesn’t hold your hand. It slaps it away and tells you to rewrite your function signature. And your lifetimes. And your error handling. And your soul.

But here's the magic part: if your code compiles, it's very likely to just... work.

In a world where more and more code is being co-authored with AI, whether that's GitHub Copilot, Claude, or some other Large Language Model, this reliability is gold. It gives you a baseline guarantee that your code is safe from whole classes of bugs before it even runs. That’s something that other backend languages just can’t match right now.

Rust + AI: A Perfect Match?

AI-assisted coding is here to stay. But anyone who’s worked with AI knows that the code it spits out isn’t always production-ready. It looks convincing. It often compiles. But sometimes it hides weird edge cases or simply fails silently in the face of bad input.

Rust might change that dynamic.

Because Rust is so strict, the AI is forced to write code that satisfies the compiler, which means memory safety, type correctness, and solid error handling are baked in from the start. That doesn’t mean you can blindly trust the AI. You still need to review, reason, and test. But your chances of shipping an AI-generated bug drop significantly. The biggest downside right now is that since the adoption of the language is still rather low, the training data available for LLMs might not be large enough yet.

My Rusty Road Ahead

I haven’t gone all-in yet. But I’m currently involved in two different startup projects, both with very AI-heavy cores, and both needing robust backends. And unless something drastically changes, Rust is my default backend language for both.

I want a backend that doesn’t fall over when my AI does something slightly weird. I want predictability. I want confidence. And I want to be able to hand over projects to junior devs or AI agents and know that the compiler has their back.

Rust isn’t perfect. But in the age of AI, I think it’s a decent partner.