Rust NYC Panel: AI Coding Agents in Rust: What Works, What Breaks

Join us on Tuesday, January 13th at our NEW SPONSOR Nominal. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begin at 7:15 p.m. Following the success of the UnConf we've taken on all of your feedback and are excited to bring back an extremely popular format for January's first event with 3 incredible panelists and the return of the much loved Cole Lawrence as moderator.

In this panel we’ll cover the unique qualities of leveraging AI coding agents to write for Rust codebases. Learn what makes Rust both a great language for AI and a uniquely difficult language for AI to write. Learn which tools experts in our community are using to write Rust with AI and the common challenges they faced and overcame to become productive. This panel comprises of both long-time senior Rust developers that have begun adopting AI in their existing workflows and new Rust adopters who are using agents and copilots from day one—bringing fresh patterns, sharp edges, and hard-won lessons. We’ll compare approaches for planning, prompting, reviewing, testing, and refactoring agent-written code; discuss where agents shine (and where they still struggle) with lifetimes, traits, async, and macros; and share practical workflows that keep quality high without sacrificing velocity. Attendees will leave with concrete tactics, recommended toolchains, and a realistic mental model for integrating AI into serious Rust engineering.

The Panelists:

Adam Benenson is the Founder and CEO of Forethink, a Rust/WASM-based browser extension designed to anticipate and accelerate browsing navigation and research workflows. He has 20 years of experience in software engineering and machine learning, having previously worked as a product leader, CTO, data scientist, and quantitative portfolio manager. Adam's daily Rust development workflow currently pairs OpenAI Codex and Claude Code CLI, leveraging both tools to iterate on system design, implementation, and refinement.

Gabriel Bianconi is the Co-Founder & CEO of TensorZero. TensorZero is building Autopilot, an automated AI engineer that analyzes LLM observability data, optimizes prompts and models, sets up evals, and runs A/B tests. It's powered by the TensorZero Stack, an open-source LLMOps platform that unifies an LLM gateway, observability, optimization, evaluation, and experimentation (10k+ GitHub stars, #1 Trending Repository of the Week). Before TensorZero, Gabriel was the CPO at Ondo Finance, the market leader in the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). On a day to day basis, his coding heavily utilizes Claude Code, often running 2-3 sessions in parallel for GitHub issues.

Alex Kesling is the Founder and CTO of Empathic, who offer the infrastructure layer AI agents need to access enterprise resources safely and effectivel which fixing the observability gap. Alex was also one of the most popular speakers at the Rust NYC UnConf in December. Prior to Empathic he was CTO at Caurus and had a lengthy and accomplished career at Google. On a day-to-day basis Alex utilizes a unique and varied cross section of AI tools that allow him to offer a unique perspective on this subject.

The Moderator:

Cole Lawrence has over ten years of experience in software engineering, with most of the last five years on founding size startups. He works on Phosphor which uses Rust for an open source graph database called TypeDB and a Rust-based computation engine. Most recently, Cole has been favoring Amp code's Oracle and Librarian tools for quick tasks, but he is also often running two agents in a "pair programming" configuration for each major plan.

Lawrence Harvey is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support.

The space is generously sponsored by our new partner Nominal.