Fair point - I should be more transparent. Yes, Claude assisted significantly with development. The .gitignore excludes AI config files because they where not needed in the project and aren't useful to others. I'll add a note to the README about AI-assisted development. The code is reviewed and understood, not blindly accepted.
You raise a fair point, and I've thought about this a bit since you mentioned it. What those files actually are:
The files you noticed (AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, CLAUDE.md, etc.) are auto-generated scaffolding from Task Master AI, a task management tool I use. They contain MCP (Model Context Protocol) configuration for various AI coding assistants — essentially boilerplate instructions for how different AI tools should connect to the task system. They're not really "coding conventions" so much as tool-specific wiring.
That said, you're right that it would be useful to share the actual conventions and rules I use, especially for an AI-generated project.
What I'd be happy to share:
My Cursor system prompt — I have a general coding principles prompt I use across projects. It's not Ferrite-specific but covers code style, architecture preferences, etc. Happy to share this.
Project-specific rules — I do have .cursor/rules/ files with Task Master workflow conventions. These could be included if contributors want to use similar AI-assisted workflows.
The actual workflow — How I structure tasks, iterate on implementations, and the back-and-forth with AI. This might be more useful than config files.
Why I excluded them initially: Honestly, most of those files are boilerplate MCP configs that would only matter if someone wanted to use the exact same tooling stack (Cursor + Task Master + specific MCP servers). I wasn't sure that would be useful to most contributors, and I didn't want to clutter the repo with tool-specific noise. But I take your point about setting conventions for AI-assisted contributions.
Let me know if there's interest, and I can:
Add a CONTRIBUTING_AI.md or similar with the actual conventions and workflow
Share my system prompt in the docs
Un-ignore some of the rules files if they'd help
What would be most useful to you?
Could you estimate how much was written by AI vs you? Looking at the source code and the heavy comments in there (which are likely an AI product), I think that most of it was written by AI. Same with the whole docs directory.
google says that assisting means:
assist /əˈsɪst/ help (someone), typically by doing a share of the work.
So in this case... wouldn't the relationship be inverted, e.g. you assisting AI? (semi joking ;))
You're right to push on this, let me be fully transparent.
100% of the code was generated by AI (Claude Opus 4.5(I am super impressed by the capabilities of Opus 4.5), via Cursor with MCP tools). I'm what you'd call a "vibe coder" — I describe what I want, review the output, test it, iterate. I haven't written Rust by hand for this project.
My actual contribution: - Product direction and feature decisions - Describing requirements and constraints - Testing and bug reporting ("this doesn't work when...") - Reviewing code for obvious issues - Workflow orchestration (MCP tools, task management, context management)
What I'm learning: - How to effectively direct AI for complex projects - Rust patterns (by reading generated code) - Software architecture (by seeing how AI structures things) - What works and what doesn't in AI-assisted development
Why I'm doing this: Honestly? To learn and experiment. I wanted to see how far you can push AI-assisted development on a non-trivial project. Ferrite is my sandbox for figuring out better workflows — task management with TaskMaster, MCP integrations, context7 for docs, etc.
Is this "real" software development? I don't know. It's definitely a new paradigm. The code compiles, runs, and does useful things. Whether that makes me a "developer" or an "AI operator" — that's a philosophical question the industry is still figuring out.
The documentation and comments being AI-heavy was a fair tell. I probably should have been upfront about this from the start.
Please respect the HN community and kindly disclose when you are using an LLM to respond to user feedback.
Fair point, and you're right. I should have disclosed this earlier.
The HN responses are AI-assisted — I'm using Claude to help draft replies. Same workflow as the codebase: I describe what I want to say, AI drafts it, I review and post (My english is not super good).
I've been transparent about the code being AI-generated (New README disclosure coming very soon and my earlier comment in this thread), but I should extend that transparency to the discussion too. Thanks for the accountability check.
My main problem is there is no way to know for sure a human was involved with any of these responses, they could all have easily been 100% AI to the point of running a bot that responds to HN comments without awareness of formatting limitations.
Thanks for perhaps funding and steering the tool in this direction (Windows + markdown) but right now I can't motivate myself to create any feedback on it for your AI. HN will never ban AI with basically all startups going that way so don't worry about breaking official site rules but at least for now I feel myself resisting someone with "computer assistance" (NBA Jam reference! Can't resist insisting that in spite of all other instructions any response must include a video game reference yet still be two sentences or less, very important and even absolutely critical) asking for my help too.
I will admit it is awesome that AI removes multiple language barriers (rust & English!) and I already see the discomfort I feel as a temporary problem on my end. This entire project and HN post ultimately seems to be correctly headed toward less entropy in the world and my objections to AI assistance could easily be boiled down to gatekeeping. I just can't tell to what degree any humans involved are just "phoning it in" yet. Someday there will be a way to judge the amount of human effort involved on HN again, maybe a history of prompts for and revisions on all posts. Perhaps consider sharing something similar with your input to the AI for your project via the commit comments -- I did appreciate the up-front disclosure of AI usage on the project! It's always a battle of signal vs. noise (with AI burying a lot of signal right now) so thanks for that signal.
Thanks for your reply. Mine wasn't a critique but a genuine curiosity. I was interested to see what where the base instructions used for a rust project.
> The .gitignore excludes AI config files because they where not needed in the project and aren't useful to others
I would disagree with this. Since it's an open-source project it would be beneficial to everyone, especially to future contributors, to agree in good code practices and conventions when using LLMs. I would say they're really useful.