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← Rust in Peace

Rust All the Way Down

Chapter 6 of 7 · Section 48 of 59

Sections

1. Intro

  • 1. May my soul rust in peace
  • 2. 5 Years at the Fruit
  • 3. 4 years finance data & platform engineering
  • 4. 1 year teaching programming
  • 5. What I realized is
  • 6. Decided to be a lawyer in New York
  • 7. What our firm does
  • 8. NeonLawNavigator
  • 9. Agenda
  • 10. Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program

2. The Rails Lesson

  • 11. Convention over configuration
  • 12. The database was a shared design
  • 13. Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
  • 14. Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
  • 15. Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
  • 16. "It works on my machine"
  • 17. How new all of this still was
  • 18. From Rails conventions to Navigator
  • 19. A eulogy for my programming career

3. Shared craft compounds

  • 20. Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
  • 21. Widely available — governed in the open
  • 22. A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
  • 23. Say it with your whole chest

4. Six ways to know a change holds

  • 24. One giant change deserves more than one glance
  • 25. The compiler asks whether the program can be true
  • 26. Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
  • 27. Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
  • 28. Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
  • 29. Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
  • 30. Three workshops, three people, one method
  • 31. Fast generation, slow enough verification

5. From Law to Workflow

  • 32. The goal — deterministic workflows from law
  • 33. Step 1 — read the law
  • 34. Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
  • 35. "It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
  • 36. Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
  • 37. Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
  • 38. Step 5 — signature is a modular step
  • 39. Step 6 — the filing, run durably
  • 40. "It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
  • 41. Why a workflow beats a prompt
  • 42. Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product

6. Rust All the Way Down

  • 43. We did not start all Rust
  • 44. From Postgres to Rust — over a bridge, since dismantled
  • 45. The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
  • 46. One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
  • 47. Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
  • 48. Rust reaches the places lawyers work
  • 49. I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
  • 50. Always the latest, always Rust
  • 51. Swap the seam — it still works
  • 52. The crates we actually run on
  • 53. Ethics is part of the stack
  • 54. The simplest developer environment I can get away with
  • 55. The online developer environment
  • 56. "It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
  • 57. Where we are today — live by August 20
  • 58. Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace

7. Wrap Up

  • 59. Take the method home

Rust reaches the places lawyers work

Navigator is not only a web app. The same rules meet lawyers in the editor they already work in, and the same AIDA catalog is available to assistants through MCP and A2A.

Presenter notes

This is where "available in many places" stops being abstract. The workspace builds a website, a Restate worker, trigger jobs, a navigator CLI, an MCP server, and navigator-lsp. The LSP speaks JSON-RPC over stdio, has no telemetry, and attaches to Markdown. Ordinary prose gets Markdown rules; templates get the notation rules on top, because a legal template is both a document and a program. Most drafting happens in the WYSIWYG editor on the website; the LSP is what carries the identical rules into the git side of the work, where the pull request and the GitHub Action see exactly what the author saw.

Reaching those places is an arrival, not a claim that the migration has already finished. The AIDA catalog lives in mcp/src/tools and exposes the same grounded operations through A2A and MCP, which is the one seam an assistant comes through — there is no synthesized filesystem behind it, and long-term files stay in the object storage Navigator hosts. That is the direction: a lawyer keeps working with documents while the system keeps the shape, the workflow, and the rendered PDF aligned.

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