Rust Dortmund Meetup - Agentic Programming - May

Join us for the next Rust Dortmund Meetup! This event will bring together Rust enthusiasts for an evening of learning, collaboration, and community building. This time with a focus on Agentic Programming.

This will be a hybrid event. More information on joining online will follow.

Please also register to the event at meentalk!

Preliminary Agenda

• 6.00pm - Doors open
• 6.30pm - Rust for Agentic Programming - Workflows and Guardrails, Tim Janus
• 7.15pm - Can Your Tests Catch This? Practical Mutation Testing for Rust Programs with mutest-rs by Zalán Bálint Lévai
• Discussion and Networking

Location
Conciso Workgarden, Pariser Bogen 7, 44269 Dortmund

Abstract - Mutation Testing
How can you tell what bugs your tests will prevent? How can you trust your tests if you do not know the answer? In the age of agentic development especially, it is more important than ever to ensure that our tests provide strong guarantees about the expected behaviour and logic of our programs. Mutation testing evaluates test effectiveness by intentionally injecting program faults and checking whether your tests detect them. The result is a powerful way to uncover weak tests and untested behaviour, and prevent potential regressions before they could happen.
In this talk, we will first introduce the principles of fault detection and untested behaviours, and how mutation testing can help identify testing gaps and even faults that might be hiding. Then, we will look at examples of testing gaps and even lurking bugs that have been found in open source Rust projects, and how mutation testing was used to uncover them. Lastly, we will explore how mutest-rs builds on the Rust compiler to make mutation testing practical, giving you useful information in barely more time than your test suite take to run.
Whether you are experienced in Rust and testing or whether you are just getting started with the language, this talk has something of interest to you!

Bio - Zalán Bálint Lévai
I am a PhD Student in Mutation Testing at the University of Sheffield, and the software engineer behind the Rust mutation testing tool, mutest-rs, which I have dedicated myself to for the past four years. My work focuses on both research and software development, and I am equally fascinated by theory and practice. My interests include compilers, static and dynamic analysis, testing and quality assurance, embedded systems, safety-critical systems engineering, and anything involving Rust. I have recently become a member of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium's Tooling Subcommittee, bringing along my knowledge on creating new developer tooling for stronger guarantees.

Abstract - Rust for Agentic Programming - Workflows and Guardrails
We explore agentic programming through MeetNTalk, a web application used for event management and archiving of the Rust Dortmund Meetup. Developed with a range of AI tools and models—including Claude, Codex, and GitHub Copilot—the project demonstrates practical agentic workflows. A comprehensive suite of unit, integration, and end-to-end tests serves as essential guardrails, ensuring that AI agents respect existing features and contracts. Rust proves particularly well-suited for this paradigm thanks to its strict typing, meaningful error messages, and compile-time safety patterns such as the newtype idiom, which move many runtime errors to the compilation stage.

Bio - Tim Janus
Tim Janus is a freelance Rust expert, consultant, and trainer based in Dortmund, Germany. With more than 15 years of experience in systems programming and performance optimization, he has worked professionally with Rust since 2023. He delivers tailored workshops to help engineering teams adopt Rust and has contributed to migrations of performance-critical C/C++ codebases.

He is the founder of the Rust Dortmund Meetup, a co-organizer of the Rust and C++ Dragons Meetup, and an active contributor to open-source Rust projects.

Tim developed MeetNTalk — the project presented in this talk — as a solo side project using agentic programming techniques in Rust.